Attacking the 35$ (not) computah

[Jan Panteltje]

Attacking the 35$ (not) computah.

"To get people interested in computers and electronics"
Then why not release the datasheet of the chips?
A circuit diagram, full documentation too.

So that is a joke.

Sinclair came with the ZX80 in the eighties.
It was all TTL chips, and a Z80 processor.
Now that was something.
The ZX81 had some of that TTL integrated.
Diagrams were available, I even had the complete ROM
disassembly commented by Dr Ohara.
THAT is how you get people interested,
BBC micro was just like BBC, a government sponsored disaster,
It flipped.
Sinclair became Sir Clive Sinclair, for his contributions
to that what you now try to claim,
I'd say to the youngsters:
Get an old ZX80.

The whole thing from an educational POV makes no sense,
as how many youngsters have a HDMI capable monitor?
The thing has no VGA.

It is just a marketing thing, maybe it was only a Broadcom evaluation board,
but then why not release chip data? Could help them sell chips..
So that does not make sense.
Of course it bytes into the profit margin of everyone else that sells
cheap single board computahs...
Farnell only sells to companies, maybe be RS will sell to an individual...
CHILD???? Oh man, for that to happen they must be in the shop window
before Christmas... LOL and then it will be 70 $ plus a mouse,
plus a HDMI monitor, plus a keyboard, plus an USB hub, plus plus...
Oh, power supply too? Or does it come with one?
Don't think so.

So, overall its hype, hype more hype, and did I mention HYPE?

The ZX81 was available from the supermarket here (V&D).

[Bruce Varley]

"Jan Panteltje" <pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:jivlcp$1ca$1...@news.datemas.de...

> Attacking the 35$ (not) computah.
>
> "To get people interested in computers and electronics"
> Then why not release the datasheet of the chips?

Why, the "datasheet" (more a complete library of documents for this sort of
device) is available on the web, along with just about every other
electronic component in existence.

> A circuit diagram, full documentation too.

So do you require a circuit diagram of your laptop in order to use it?

I haven't found the remotest need for a schematic for the embedded linux
boards I use, the only hardware information that's at all necessary is the
pinout for I/O. 99.9% of my documentation requirement is software related.

[Chieftain of the Carpet Crawlers]

On Sun, 04 Mar 2012 11:58:15 GMT, Jan Panteltje
<pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> wrote:

>The whole thing from an educational POV makes no sense,
>as how many youngsters have a HDMI capable monitor?
>The thing has no VGA.

You're an idiot. In the "ZX80" days, there were CGA and VGA monitors.
We didn't see you pissing and moaning for the folks who could only afford
CGA.

Many displays these days have HDMI input, you twit.

One can also convert from HDMI to DVI.

Got any other 100% retarded criticisms, idiot?

[Andy Bartlett]

"Chieftain of the Carpet Crawlers"
<thesli...@thebarattheendoftheuniverse.org> wrote in message
news:76s6l71h2eqfsdfo8...@4ax.com...

Your both wrong. The ZX80 output was a modulated TV channel 36 monochrome
output. (Aztec UHF modulator IIRC).

[Nico Coesel]

Jan Panteltje <pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> wrote:

>Attacking the 35$ (not) computah.
>
>"To get people interested in computers and electronics"
> Then why not release the datasheet of the chips?
>A circuit diagram, full documentation too.
>
>So that is a joke.
>
>

>The whole thing from an educational POV makes no sense,
>as how many youngsters have a HDMI capable monitor?

HDMI is pretty close to DVI. A conversion cable is enough to connect
any DVI TFT monitor to it.

--
Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply
indicates you are not using the right tools...
nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.)
--------------------------------------------------------------

[Jamie]

Yes, I have one, a a couple for parts. And no, I won't give it up..


Jamie

[petrus bitbyter]

"Jan Panteltje" <pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> schreef in bericht
news:jivlcp$1ca$1...@news.datemas.de...
<snip>

> Farnell only sells to companies, maybe be RS will sell to an individual...

<snip>

It's the other way around these days.

petrus bitbyter

[Syd Rumpo]

On 04/03/2012 11:58, Jan Panteltje wrote:
> Attacking the 35$ (not) computah.

> BBC micro was just like BBC, a government sponsored disaster,
> It flipped.

Highly successful as I remember. The BBC is often quite good too.

> So, overall its hype, hype more hype, and did I mention HYPE?

I can do no better than to quote Steve Pelc from a previous thread:

"I detect a note of "Not Invented Here" in some of the comments.
IMHO Raspberry Pi is a cause for celebration, not for whining."

And there are already some quite neat housings available, for example:

http://tinyurl.com/6lvv5dn

Cheers
--
Syd

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Sun, 04 Mar 2012 14:23:33 GMT) it happened ni...@puntnl.niks
(Nico Coesel) wrote in <4f537a65....@news.kpn.nl>:

>Jan Panteltje <pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>Attacking the 35$ (not) computah.
>>
>>"To get people interested in computers and electronics"
>> Then why not release the datasheet of the chips?
>>A circuit diagram, full documentation too.
>>
>>So that is a joke.
>>
>>
>>The whole thing from an educational POV makes no sense,
>>as how many youngsters have a HDMI capable monitor?
>
>HDMI is pretty close to DVI. A conversion cable is enough to connect
>any DVI TFT monitor to it.

The ZX80 / ZX81 / ZXspectrum had RF out for connection to any teafee set at that time
It also had a keyboard.
And one of the best BASICs (Dartmouth) with syntax checking on entry
of a line.
You could program it in asm too.
So the kids could connect it to the teafee in the living room
and fight for access versus other shows.
It would still work on 90% of the teafees out there today.
It came with power supply.
Within a very short time a zillion extension things were on the market,
I had for example, a nice 64 kB dynamic ram module that plugged into it.
The bus was accessible on the back side.

I am not arguing that that 100$ alias 35$ thingy is a real computah,
I state that its educational value and especially its electronic educational
value is zero compared to what Sir Clive brought, same from the value for money
in that aspect POV.
\They have been playing the press about it for many month now,
plenty of time to make at least a decent diagram and provide links to
or include the datasheets.
Any twit can get a Broadcom chip in large quantities and install a Linux.
It is all hype and not worth a dime.
<sound of horse>

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Sun, 4 Mar 2012 13:46:12 -0000) it happened "Andy Bartlett"
<an...@nospamming.net> wrote in
<XLCdne42mta6787S...@brightview.co.uk>:

No, AlwayWrong is wrong as always he is wrong,
but I am not, I had 2 ZX81 and 1 ZX80.
Yes the Aztec modulator, I still have it maybe.

[Chieftain of the Carpet Crawlers]

On Sun, 4 Mar 2012 13:46:12 -0000, "Andy Bartlett" <an...@nospamming.net>
wrote:

My fucking point was that he did not have one, idiot.

[k...@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz]

On Sun, 4 Mar 2012 20:11:32 +0800, "Bruce Varley" <b...@NoSpam.com> wrote:

>
>"Jan Panteltje" <pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
>news:jivlcp$1ca$1...@news.datemas.de...
>> Attacking the 35$ (not) computah.
>>
>> "To get people interested in computers and electronics"
>> Then why not release the datasheet of the chips?
>Why, the "datasheet" (more a complete library of documents for this sort of
>device) is available on the web, along with just about every other
>electronic component in existence.

Agreed.

>> A circuit diagram, full documentation too.
>So do you require a circuit diagram of your laptop in order to use it?

This is touted as increasing the visibility of ENGINEERING. Without this
information, at a minimum, it's just another script-kiddy toy.

>
>I haven't found the remotest need for a schematic for the embedded linux
>boards I use, the only hardware information that's at all necessary is the
>pinout for I/O. 99.9% of my documentation requirement is software related.

Different product. Different purpose. See above.

[Chieftain of the Carpet Crawlers]

On Sun, 04 Mar 2012 14:52:14 GMT, Jan Panteltje
<pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> wrote:

>I am not arguing that that 100$ alias 35$ thingy is a real computah,

Juat the fact that you use that 'word' (non-word) at all, makes you a
"totahl retahd".

[Chieftain of the Carpet Crawlers]

On Sun, 04 Mar 2012 14:59:55 GMT, Jan Panteltje

<pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> wrote:

>On a sunny day (Sun, 4 Mar 2012 13:46:12 -0000) it happened "Andy Bartlett"
><an...@nospamming.net> wrote in
><XLCdne42mta6787S...@brightview.co.uk>:
>
>>
>>"Chieftain of the Carpet Crawlers"
>><thesli...@thebarattheendoftheuniverse.org> wrote in message
>>news:76s6l71h2eqfsdfo8...@4ax.com...
>>> On Sun, 04 Mar 2012 11:58:15 GMT, Jan Panteltje
>>> <pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>The whole thing from an educational POV makes no sense,
>>>>as how many youngsters have a HDMI capable monitor?
>>>>The thing has no VGA.
>>>
>>>
>>> You're an idiot. In the "ZX80" days, there were CGA and VGA monitors.
>>> We didn't see you pissing and moaning for the folks who could only afford
>>> CGA.
>>>
>>> Many displays these days have HDMI input, you twit.
>>>
>>> One can also convert from HDMI to DVI.
>>>
>>> Got any other 100% retarded criticisms, idiot?
>>
>>
>>Your both wrong. The ZX80 output was a modulated TV channel 36 monochrome
>>output. (Aztec UHF modulator IIRC).
>
>No, AlwayWrong is wrong as always he is wrong,
>but I am not, I had 2 ZX81 and 1 ZX80.
>Yes the Aztec modulator, I still have it maybe.

You both missed the fucking point entirely.

You are a goddamned crybaby, and you do NOT know what you are talking
about, and he simply chided me because I picked two common display modes
from back then, and neither matched the pathetic ZX80.

It was a bad guess, but your IQ keeps you from getting the actual
point.

It don't get no dumber than you, idiot.

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Sun, 04 Mar 2012 11:07:29 -0500) it happened
"k...@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz" <k...@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz> wrote in
<5m47l7lurcci1e8mp...@4ax.com>:

>On Sun, 4 Mar 2012 20:11:32 +0800, "Bruce Varley" <b...@NoSpam.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>"Jan Panteltje" <pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
>>news:jivlcp$1ca$1...@news.datemas.de...
>>> Attacking the 35$ (not) computah.
>>>
>>> "To get people interested in computers and electronics"
>>> Then why not release the datasheet of the chips?
>>Why, the "datasheet" (more a complete library of documents for this sort of
>>device) is available on the web, along with just about every other
>>electronic component in existence.
>
>Agreed.

The datasheet or better full documentation of the Broadcom chip
this thing is based on is only available under NDA,
says their OWN site.

What else is there? They added a RAM chip.
The Broadcom thing does everything else.
Wow, such engineering!

There is very little difference between my old Linksys WiFi router
and this, but of course the WiFi router has WiFi....
It has hidden RS232 and USB (IIRC) too.
It sold or about 56 Euro.
Runs Linux, but MIPS.
http://panteltje.com/panteltje/wap54g/index.html
If you open it up it has a Broadcom chip, RAM and FLASH.
I have hacked it a lot..
Same thing, now Broadcom has added HDMI capable graphics.

So, did anybody shout from the treetops that this is the next thing
in teaching children about conputahs and electronics?
You have to be pretty good in all that to begin with,
plus in Linux, to even experiment with it.

It seems to be that if you go that route, then the OLPC
(one laptop per child) was a better choice, display,
keyboard, power, software all there for < 100$ IIRC.
Plus WiFi.

[Martin Riddle]

"Jan Panteltje" <pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> wrote in message

news:jj051b$ssp$1...@news.datemas.de...

> On a sunny day (Sun, 04 Mar 2012 11:07:29 -0500) it happened
> "k...@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz" <k...@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz> wrote in
> <5m47l7lurcci1e8mp...@4ax.com>:
>
>>On Sun, 4 Mar 2012 20:11:32 +0800, "Bruce Varley" <b...@NoSpam.com>
>>wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>"Jan Panteltje" <pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
>>>news:jivlcp$1ca$1...@news.datemas.de...
>>>> Attacking the 35$ (not) computah.
>>>>
>>>> "To get people interested in computers and electronics"
>>>> Then why not release the datasheet of the chips?
>>>Why, the "datasheet" (more a complete library of documents for this
>>>sort of
>>>device) is available on the web, along with just about every other
>>>electronic component in existence.
>>
>>Agreed.
>
> The datasheet or better full documentation of the Broadcom chip
> this thing is based on is only available under NDA,
> says their OWN site.
>

I don't think there is anything on their website that can be had with
out a NDA.
Maybe some open source tools and related documentation, but that’s it.

Cheers

[asdf]

On Sun, 04 Mar 2012 11:58:15 +0000, Jan Panteltje wrote:

> Attacking the 35$ (not) computah.
>
> "To get people interested in computers and electronics"
> Then why not release the datasheet of the chips?
> A circuit diagram, full documentation too.
>
> So that is a joke.
>
> Sinclair came with the ZX80 in the eighties. It was all TTL chips, and a
> Z80 processor. Now that was something.

< ...

This post at their site has a nice diagram showing what's open and what's
not, which to me tells more than 1000 words.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/592

Nice design and very tempting price, but I wouldn't use it for anything
serious nor for teaching. I'd rather wait for the inevitable answer by
competitors, in the hope they won't use the same dreadful Broadcom
chipset.

[k...@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz]

On Sun, 4 Mar 2012 16:57:16 -0500, "Martin Riddle" <marti...@verizon.net>

wrote:

>
>"Jan Panteltje" <pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
>news:jj051b$ssp$1...@news.datemas.de...
>> On a sunny day (Sun, 04 Mar 2012 11:07:29 -0500) it happened
>> "k...@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz" <k...@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz> wrote in
>> <5m47l7lurcci1e8mp...@4ax.com>:
>>
>>>On Sun, 4 Mar 2012 20:11:32 +0800, "Bruce Varley" <b...@NoSpam.com>
>>>wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>"Jan Panteltje" <pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
>>>>news:jivlcp$1ca$1...@news.datemas.de...
>>>>> Attacking the 35$ (not) computah.
>>>>>
>>>>> "To get people interested in computers and electronics"
>>>>> Then why not release the datasheet of the chips?
>>>>Why, the "datasheet" (more a complete library of documents for this
>>>>sort of
>>>>device) is available on the web, along with just about every other
>>>>electronic component in existence.
>>>
>>>Agreed.
>>
>> The datasheet or better full documentation of the Broadcom chip
>> this thing is based on is only available under NDA,
>> says their OWN site.
>>
>I don't think there is anything on their website that can be had with
>out a NDA.
>Maybe some open source tools and related documentation, but that’s it.

...and this is supposed to be "open", somehow? The more that comes out, the
more obvious it becomes that it's just a Broadcom sales gimmick. <yawn>

[Michael A. Terrell]

Jan Panteltje wrote:
>
> Attacking the 35$ (not) computah.
>
> "To get people interested in computers and electronics"
> Then why not release the datasheet of the chips?
> A circuit diagram, full documentation too.
>
> So that is a joke.
>
> Sinclair came with the ZX80 in the eighties.
> It was all TTL chips, and a Z80 processor.
> Now that was something.

Sold as the Timex/Sinclair in the US. They soon dropped to $10 to move
them off the shelves.


--
You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense.

[John Devereux]

Jan Panteltje <pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> writes:

> Attacking the 35$ (not) computah.
>
> "To get people interested in computers and electronics"
> Then why not release the datasheet of the chips?
> A circuit diagram, full documentation too.
>
> So that is a joke.
>
> Sinclair came with the ZX80 in the eighties.
> It was all TTL chips, and a Z80 processor.
> Now that was something.
> The ZX81 had some of that TTL integrated.
> Diagrams were available, I even had the complete ROM
> disassembly commented by Dr Ohara.
> THAT is how you get people interested,
> BBC micro was just like BBC, a government sponsored disaster,
> It flipped.

You mean flopped? It was very successful, and led directly to ARM.

> Sinclair became Sir Clive Sinclair, for his contributions
> to that what you now try to claim,
> I'd say to the youngsters:
> Get an old ZX80.
>
> The whole thing from an educational POV makes no sense,
> as how many youngsters have a HDMI capable monitor?

They have TVs...

> The thing has no VGA.
>
> It is just a marketing thing, maybe it was only a Broadcom evaluation board,
> but then why not release chip data? Could help them sell chips..
> So that does not make sense.
> Of course it bytes into the profit margin of everyone else that sells
> cheap single board computahs...
> Farnell only sells to companies, maybe be RS will sell to an individual...
> CHILD???? Oh man, for that to happen they must be in the shop window
> before Christmas... LOL and then it will be 70 $ plus a mouse,
> plus a HDMI monitor, plus a keyboard, plus an USB hub, plus plus...
> Oh, power supply too? Or does it come with one?
> Don't think so.
>
> So, overall its hype, hype more hype, and did I mention HYPE?
>
> The ZX81 was available from the supermarket here (V&D).
>
>
>
>
>

--

John Devereux

[Martin Brown]

On 04/03/2012 11:58, Jan Panteltje wrote:

> Attacking the 35$ (not) computah.
>
> "To get people interested in computers and electronics"
> Then why not release the datasheet of the chips?
> A circuit diagram, full documentation too.
>
> So that is a joke.
>
> Sinclair came with the ZX80 in the eighties.

You are rewriting history. Sinclair's first computer kit was the DIY
assembly MK14 based on the SC/MP microcontroller and launched in 1977.

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=961

It started Chris Curry on a trajectory with Herman Hauser that would
result in the formation of Acorn, the Atom. the BBC Micro (aka Proton)
and indirectly ARM. Raspberry Pi follows a long tradition.

> It was all TTL chips, and a Z80 processor.
> Now that was something.
> The ZX81 had some of that TTL integrated.
> Diagrams were available, I even had the complete ROM
> disassembly commented by Dr Ohara.
> THAT is how you get people interested,
> BBC micro was just like BBC, a government sponsored disaster,

Rubbish. It was extremely successful and found everywhere. So much so
that there were third party hardware and ROMs to allow it to be used as
smart terminals, IEEE bus controllers and sundry other things.

The BBC Micro graphics hardware at the time was so advanced that export
of them to Russia and East Germany was against COCOM rules!

> It flipped.
> Sinclair became Sir Clive Sinclair, for his contributions
> to that what you now try to claim,
> I'd say to the youngsters:
> Get an old ZX80.
>
> The whole thing from an educational POV makes no sense,
> as how many youngsters have a HDMI capable monitor?
> The thing has no VGA.
>
> It is just a marketing thing, maybe it was only a Broadcom evaluation board,
> but then why not release chip data? Could help them sell chips..
> So that does not make sense.
> Of course it bytes into the profit margin of everyone else that sells
> cheap single board computahs...
> Farnell only sells to companies, maybe be RS will sell to an individual...
> CHILD???? Oh man, for that to happen they must be in the shop window
> before Christmas... LOL and then it will be 70 $ plus a mouse,
> plus a HDMI monitor, plus a keyboard, plus an USB hub, plus plus...
> Oh, power supply too? Or does it come with one?
> Don't think so.
>
> So, overall its hype, hype more hype, and did I mention HYPE?
>
> The ZX81 was available from the supermarket here (V&D).

Sinclair's products were mostly noted for their naff keyboards starting
with the MK14 and getting worse and the dreaded QL microdrives which
would trash all your work in an instant given half a chance.

We made addons for both the BBC Micro and the QL. The latter never
managed to sell the whole of the first production run of anything. It
wasn't as bad as the C5 which required application of C4 to make it go.

I suspect there are still C5 body shells dumped in a yard somewhere.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Mon, 05 Mar 2012 09:21:25 +0000) it happened Leroy Brown,
the baddest man in the whole whole town, misspelled:

>On 04/03/2012 11:58, Jan Panteltje wrote:
>> Attacking the 35$ (not) computah.
>>
>> "To get people interested in computers and electronics"
>> Then why not release the datasheet of the chips?
>> A circuit diagram, full documentation too.
>>
>> So that is a joke.
>>
>> Sinclair came with the ZX80 in the eighties.
>
>You are rewriting history. Sinclair's first computer kit was the DIY
>assembly MK14 based on the SC/MP microcontroller and launched in 1977.

No, I am talking bout the ZX80 and ZX81.
Not about how the wheel was invented.

>> It was all TTL chips, and a Z80 processor.
>> Now that was something.
>> The ZX81 had some of that TTL integrated.
>> Diagrams were available, I even had the complete ROM
>> disassembly commented by Dr Ohara.
>> THAT is how you get people interested,
>> BBC micro was just like BBC, a government sponsored disaster,
>
>Rubbish. It was extremely successful and found everywhere.

As far as I remember there was one person who had one in my
country and he did not know how to use it ;-)

>The BBC Micro graphics hardware at the time was so advanced that export
>of them to Russia and East Germany was against COCOM rules!

LOL, probably because it was virus infected.

>> It flipped.
>> Sinclair became Sir Clive Sinclair, for his contributions
>> to that what you now try to claim,
>> I'd say to the youngsters:
>> Get an old ZX80.
>>
>> The whole thing from an educational POV makes no sense,
>> as how many youngsters have a HDMI capable monitor?
>> The thing has no VGA.
>>
>> It is just a marketing thing, maybe it was only a Broadcom evaluation board,
>> but then why not release chip data? Could help them sell chips..
>> So that does not make sense.
>> Of course it bytes into the profit margin of everyone else that sells
>> cheap single board computahs...
>> Farnell only sells to companies, maybe be RS will sell to an individual...
>> CHILD???? Oh man, for that to happen they must be in the shop window
>> before Christmas... LOL and then it will be 70 $ plus a mouse,
>> plus a HDMI monitor, plus a keyboard, plus an USB hub, plus plus...
>> Oh, power supply too? Or does it come with one?
>> Don't think so.
>>
>> So, overall its hype, hype more hype, and did I mention HYPE?
>>
>> The ZX81 was available from the supermarket here (V&D).
>
>Sinclair's products were mostly noted for their naff keyboards starting
>with the MK14 and getting worse and the dreaded QL microdrives which
>would trash all your work in an instant given half a chance.

The ZX80 and ZX81 used a cassette tape drive to load programs.
Did you ever own one?
Does not look like it.

Yes the foil keyboards were fragile, but not so fragile that I could not write a
CP/M clone on it in asm, using a Sony cassette drive as storage,
then I added IBM PC keyboard drivers..
That foil keyboard was probably better for programming development
than those rub screens you see nowadays, not to mention my 1000 Euro Samsung laptop
keyboard where the space bar only works if you hit it in the middle.
So Sir Sinclair really did a very good job compared to the crap that is made these days
by clueless South Korean designers in half an hour before lunch time.

You are just pissed because the BBC micro was such a flipping flop :-)

>We made addons for both the BBC Micro and the QL.

Yes, must have been you....

The latter never
>managed to sell the whole of the first production run of anything. It
>wasn't as bad as the C5 which required application of C4 to make it go.
>
>I suspect there are still C5 body shells dumped in a yard somewhere.

No idea what C4 and C5 is, I was talking about the ZX80 and ZX81 design.
Absolutely revolutional.

That ZX80 ZX81 came with a very nice manual too, nice book.
DOCUMENTATION, if you want to teach kids, that is where it starts,

But I guess for some British gov peddler it is more falsifying news,
that is where the BBC word comes in.
Blairing Tony made it even worse.
Then they started their own Al Jazeera...

When I was still very young propaganda had me convinced the BBC was really good.
I have been there, talked to their technicians, looked in their 4 tube cameras.
When I got older and learned looking from different points of view I learned
how sad an instrument it is,
A BBC coNputah, just imagine, wonder if it would modify code you typed.
.
No export to the USSR what???? Most fortunate they were!
They got Sputnik up without any BBC crap helping them.
Now they are re-stabilizing Syria.

OK, let's carry on a bit, I am very happy Putin won the fair elections by a large margin.

Obanana the hypocrite, 'we will fight high oil prices with all we can',
supported the Arab spring, in fact organized it, with support from its slave the UK
who with their little atomic submarines shot missiles at innocent people in Tripoli.
So now Obanana finances all his 'alternative energy' projects so to look good to
his fellow DemonRats.
Obanana CAUSES the high oil prices, now by constantly threatening Iran,
before the Iraq, where his predecessor GWBushman sold pictures of Iraqi mobile fish and chip shops
as mobile laboratories containing weapons of mass destruction.
(of course in a way the fat in yoiur fish and chips will do that :-))
Mr Brown, brown brown, you and your club are the baddest people in town.
To make a 180 degree turn., Her Majesty was RIGHT in knighting Sir Sinclair
for his great contribution to mankind and the British economy, and education of
its people.

LOL
We need more people like Sir Clive.
I want to thank him here for the great time I had playing with the results of his pipe dreams.
And you, for heavens sake, design something, lets see it.

[Jasen Betts]

On 2012-03-04, Jan Panteltje <pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Attacking the 35$ (not) computah.
>
> "To get people interested in computers and electronics"
> Then why not release the datasheet of the chips?
> A circuit diagram, full documentation too.
>
> So that is a joke.
>
> Sinclair came with the ZX80 in the eighties.
> It was all TTL chips, and a Z80 processor.
> Now that was something.
> The ZX81 had some of that TTL integrated.
> Diagrams were available, I even had the complete ROM
> disassembly commented by Dr Ohara.
> THAT is how you get people interested,
> BBC micro was just like BBC, a government sponsored disaster,
> It flipped.
> Sinclair became Sir Clive Sinclair, for his contributions
> to that what you now try to claim,
> I'd say to the youngsters:
> Get an old ZX80.
>
> The whole thing from an educational POV makes no sense,
> as how many youngsters have a HDMI capable monitor?

How many homes have a digital TV. (plugs into the telly, like a zx80)

> The thing has no VGA.

VGA is obsolete.

> It is just a marketing thing, maybe it was only a Broadcom evaluation board,
> but then why not release chip data? Could help them sell chips..

http://www.farnell.com/datasheets/1521578.pdf (BCM2835 datasheet link
on farnell RaspberryPi page)

> So that does not make sense.
> Of course it bytes into the profit margin of everyone else that sells

> cheap single board computahs... Farnell only sells to companies,

farnell will sell to anyone who has a, credit card, debit card. or
equivalent...

--
⚂⚃ 100% natural

[Martin Brown]

On 05/03/2012 05:39, Michael A. Terrell wrote:
>
> Jan Panteltje wrote:
>>
>> Attacking the 35$ (not) computah.
>>
>> "To get people interested in computers and electronics"
>> Then why not release the datasheet of the chips?
>> A circuit diagram, full documentation too.
>>
>> So that is a joke.
>>
>> Sinclair came with the ZX80 in the eighties.
>> It was all TTL chips, and a Z80 processor.
>> Now that was something.
>
> Sold as the Timex/Sinclair in the US. They soon dropped to $10 to move
> them off the shelves.

The ZX80 was a joke - rushed out to try and spoil the launch of Acorn's
BBC Micro (Clive Sinclair was a very sore loser). Instead it provided a
demonstration of just how well made and specified the BBC Model was when
compared to a piece of fragile plastic tat with a dead flesh membrane
keyboard. BBC Micro outsold the ZX80 by 15 to 1 despite being more than
twice the price it offered so very much more to the user.

The Beebon never really worked on NTSC TVs which hampered its entry into
the US market (but that was never in the graphics design spec).

The ZX81 was actually a slightly more reasonable piece of kit. But by
then there were a host of other players in the market. It did roughly
equal the sales of the BBC Micro in this later incarnation. But then
Sinclair went off the rails with the doomed QL and its data destroying
microdrives. The rest is history.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

[JW]

On Sun, 04 Mar 2012 05:42:56 -0800 Chieftain of the Carpet Crawlers
<thesli...@thebarattheendoftheuniverse.org> wrote in Message id:
<76s6l71h2eqfsdfo8...@4ax.com>:

>On Sun, 04 Mar 2012 11:58:15 GMT, Jan Panteltje
><pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>The whole thing from an educational POV makes no sense,
>>as how many youngsters have a HDMI capable monitor?
>>The thing has no VGA.
>
>
> You're an idiot. In the "ZX80" days, there were CGA and VGA monitors.

ZX81 (The ZX80 successor) was discontinued in 1984. VGA was introduced in
1987. You are AlwaysWrong.

>We didn't see you pissing and moaning for the folks who could only afford
>CGA.
>
> Many displays these days have HDMI input, you twit.
>
> One can also convert from HDMI to DVI.
>
> Got any other 100% retarded criticisms, idiot?

Yeah, why are you AlwaysWrong?

[DJ Delorie]

Jan Panteltje <pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> writes:
> The ZX80 / ZX81 / ZXspectrum had RF out for connection to any teafee
> set at that time

The Raspberry Pi has an HDMI output for connection to any TV set of
*its* time :-)

> It also had a keyboard.

RP uses a standard $5 USB keyboard. I have a stack of them.

> And one of the best BASICs (Dartmouth) with syntax checking on entry
> of a line. You could program it in asm too.

RP uses state-of-the-arg gcc plus EVERY OTHER language you can get for
Linux. FORTRAN? Pascal? Lisp? Perl? Python? ASM? Turtle graphics?
All there, and it all runs on the RP.

> So the kids could connect it to the teafee in the living room
> and fight for access versus other shows.

RP can do that too.

> It would still work on 90% of the teafees out there today.

RP's work on 90% of the TVs out today.

> It came with power supply.

RP uses standard cell phone power supplies. I have a dozen around here.

> Within a very short time a zillion extension things were on the market,

RP is hoping that happens again. Arduino certainly saw that happen.

> I had for example, a nice 64 kB dynamic ram module that plugged into
> it. The bus was accessible on the back side.

RP has 256 Meg of ram, and the "bus" is USB, but there are other
connections on the RP too.

> I am not arguing that that 100$ alias 35$ thingy is a real computah,

I see no evidence of a $100 price anywhere...

> I state that its educational value and especially its electronic
> educational value is zero compared to what Sir Clive brought, same
> from the value for money

A third the price, a lot more functionality, and you say it's value is
zero?

> plenty of time to make at least a decent diagram and provide links to

Hey look! A decent diagram and links: http://elinux.org/Rpi_Hardware

> It is all hype and not worth a dime.

Then don't buy it, more for us.

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Mon, 05 Mar 2012 15:41:14 -0500) it happened DJ Delorie
<d...@delorie.com> wrote in <xnaa3ug...@delorie.com>:

That limited stock huh?
:_)

[Joel Koltner]

In general I agree with your analysis, but this point got me:

DJ Delorie wrote:
>> Within a very short time a zillion extension things were on the market,
> RP is hoping that happens again. Arduino certainly saw that happen.

The difference here is that the ZX80/81 had schematics and there was
nothing proprietary about it (Z81 manuals could be had for the cost of
printing, or often free if you asked nicely). The RP has a proprietary
ARM processor that one needs to sign an NDA to obtain the full
specs/programming info for. That's a rather higher barrier to entry
than someone just fooling around in their bedroom with the ZX81...

I think it's a neat board, but if I had a kid who was interested in
checking out something like this, I'd definitely steer them to something
like the Beagleboard that, even though it's more expensive, is
completely open and documented. (I mean, I kinda doubt Broadcomm would
even enter into an NDA with, say, a 14-year-old, would they?)

I also predict the cost of the board will slowly creep up over time,
just as it did with OLPC.

---Joel

[DJ Delorie]

Jan Panteltje <pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> writes:
> That limited stock huh?
> :_)

Well, 10,000 units in the first run, and about 10X that for demand.
They say they're ramping up as fast as they can. They are, after all, a
charity.

[DJ Delorie]

Joel Koltner <zapwire...@yahoo.com> writes:
> The difference here is that the ZX80/81 had schematics and there was
> nothing proprietary about it

The ASIC design files were proprietary. The Z80 microcode and chip
design was proprietary. The firmware sources were proprietary. Every
computer has some line between "published" and "secret". So what if you
don't have a pinout for the RPi mcu? There's no way you could solder to
that tiny BGA anyway.

I think we need to adjust our view of what the RPi is about - it's a
COMPONENT in a bigger project. It's a TOY to learn Linux and embedded
design with. It's an INTERFACE for other parts of your project. It's
CHEAP enough to throw away if you accidentaly fry it. It comes with
LINUX pre-installed so you don't have to worry about the low-level
hardware anyway. RPi isn't targetting the 0.01% who want to get into
chip design and writing hardware drivers. They're targetting the 1% who
want to build things with them.

Besides, the RPi foundation says they'll release the schematics and a
SoC datasheet, so save your hating for later ;-)

The RPi is not about figuring out how the RPi itself works. The RPi is
about figuring out how other things work. Do you have schematics for
your desktop PC? Datasheets for that proprietary NVidia card? Do you
even care what the USB electrical bitstream looks like? Or do you just
plug compatible things into it and go from there?

I had a ZX81. Built one or two expansion cards for it. Yes, I had the
schematics, but other than the connector pinout they were not useful.

> The RP has a proprietary ARM processor that one needs to sign an NDA
> to obtain the full specs/programming info for.

You don't need that level of detail to control the GPIO ports or a USB
device. Since it's ARM, there's already enough documentation to do
things I'd expect a 14-year old to do with it.

[Nico Coesel]

You also believe every promise a politician makes when elections are
coming up? It is more likely that not a single unit has been assembled
yet. Nobody knows until they actually get delivered.

--
Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply
indicates you are not using the right tools...
nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.)
--------------------------------------------------------------

[DJ Delorie]

ni...@puntnl.niks (Nico Coesel) writes:
>>Well, 10,000 units in the first run, and about 10X that for demand.
>>They say they're ramping up as fast as they can. They are, after all, a
>>charity.
>
> You also believe every promise a politician makes when elections are
> coming up? It is more likely that not a single unit has been assembled
> yet. Nobody knows until they actually get delivered.

I believe that they said that, and I believe that they're a charity.
I've been following their blogs, and they did say that the first batch
was built, last they mentioned it they were sending someone to the
factory to test them and see to shipping them back. I can't prove any
of this is true, but I have no reason to doubt it either.

I'm not an idiot, but I'm not a total cynic either. I know people who
have held a RPi in their hands, and I'm part of the project to port
Fedora to ARM (the RPi runs Fedora, not Ubuntu - and Ubuntu does not
*want* the RPi to even claim they run Ubuntu), so I'm slightly more of
an "insider" than the average person.

[Robert Baer]

Jan Panteltje wrote:
> Attacking the 35$ (not) computah.
>
> "To get people interested in computers and electronics"
> Then why not release the datasheet of the chips?
> A circuit diagram, full documentation too.
>
> So that is a joke.
>
> Sinclair came with the ZX80 in the eighties.
> It was all TTL chips, and a Z80 processor.
> Now that was something.

> The ZX81 had some of that TTL integrated.
> Diagrams were available, I even had the complete ROM
> disassembly commented by Dr Ohara.
> THAT is how you get people interested,
> BBC micro was just like BBC, a government sponsored disaster,
> It flipped.
> Sinclair became Sir Clive Sinclair, for his contributions
> to that what you now try to claim,
> I'd say to the youngsters:
> Get an old ZX80.
>

> The whole thing from an educational POV makes no sense,
> as how many youngsters have a HDMI capable monitor?
> The thing has no VGA.
>

> It is just a marketing thing, maybe it was only a Broadcom evaluation board,
> but then why not release chip data? Could help them sell chips..

> So that does not make sense.
> Of course it bytes into the profit margin of everyone else that sells
> cheap single board computahs...

> Farnell only sells to companies, maybe be RS will sell to an individual...
> CHILD???? Oh man, for that to happen they must be in the shop window
> before Christmas... LOL and then it will be 70 $ plus a mouse,
> plus a HDMI monitor, plus a keyboard, plus an USB hub, plus plus...
> Oh, power supply too? Or does it come with one?
> Don't think so.
>
> So, overall its hype, hype more hype, and did I mention HYPE?
>
> The ZX81 was available from the supermarket here (V&D).
>
>
>
>
>

Check and double check.
At the Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley, early daze, when the
apple FIRST came out it was a kit of boards and parts; a complete DIY
that became so popular that the product morphed a number of times and
the backers morphed also (into a company).
Then there was an 8008 "kit" where one could get a manual that
included full-size B&W "tapeouts" of each board, monitor listings, etc.
Parts and boards were also available.
Oh yeah..did i forget to mention the Altair 8080 the first full kit
that cost about the same as the chocolate bar "chip"?

Them wuz heady daze when one could actually learn ALL about a
computer, literally from the inside out.

[Robert Baer]

Bruce Varley wrote:
> "Jan Panteltje"<pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:jivlcp$1ca$1...@news.datemas.de...

>> Attacking the 35$ (not) computah.
>>
>> "To get people interested in computers and electronics"
>> Then why not release the datasheet of the chips?

> Why, the "datasheet" (more a complete library of documents for this sort of
> device) is available on the web, along with just about every other
> electronic component in existence.
>

>> A circuit diagram, full documentation too.

> So do you require a circuit diagram of your laptop in order to use it?
>

> I haven't found the remotest need for a schematic for the embedded linux
> boards I use, the only hardware information that's at all necessary is the
> pinout for I/O. 99.9% of my documentation requirement is software related.
>

>> So that is a joke.
>>
>
>

I dare you to BUILD one from scratch that allows: Floppy A and B,
256-byte sector R/W, deleted sector R/W, support of 8" floppies all
densities up to 1.2Meg and 5.25" floppies all densities to 800K and 3.5"
floppies all densities to 2.88M, and up to 4096-byte sectors, and
variable density sectors.
You CANNOT find all of the documentation to do the hardware to make
it possible.
The hardware since the Pentium removed the HARDWARE to do deleted
sector R/W; write all the SOFTWARE you want and it ain't gonna werk.
More recent hardware changes locked out the "B" floppy drive.
Etc..

[Robert Baer]

Chieftain of the Carpet Crawlers wrote:
> On Sun, 04 Mar 2012 11:58:15 GMT, Jan Panteltje
> <pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>

>> The whole thing from an educational POV makes no sense,
>> as how many youngsters have a HDMI capable monitor?
>> The thing has no VGA.
>
>

> You're an idiot. In the "ZX80" days, there were CGA and VGA monitors.

> We didn't see you pissing and moaning for the folks who could only afford
> CGA.
>
> Many displays these days have HDMI input, you twit.
>
> One can also convert from HDMI to DVI.
>
> Got any other 100% retarded criticisms, idiot?

Go back under the carpet!

[Robert Baer]

Andy Bartlett wrote:
> "Chieftain of the Carpet Crawlers"

> <thesli...@thebarattheendoftheuniverse.org> wrote in message
> news:76s6l71h2eqfsdfo8...@4ax.com...

>> On Sun, 04 Mar 2012 11:58:15 GMT, Jan Panteltje
>> <pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>> The whole thing from an educational POV makes no sense,
>>> as how many youngsters have a HDMI capable monitor?
>>> The thing has no VGA.
>>
>>
>> You're an idiot. In the "ZX80" days, there were CGA and VGA monitors.
>> We didn't see you pissing and moaning for the folks who could only afford
>> CGA.
>>
>> Many displays these days have HDMI input, you twit.
>>
>> One can also convert from HDMI to DVI.
>>
>> Got any other 100% retarded criticisms, idiot?
>
>

> Your both wrong. The ZX80 output was a modulated TV channel 36 monochrome
> output. (Aztec UHF modulator IIRC).
>
>

I do not think there was such a thing a s channel 36..been too long -
think the tops was channel 13.

[SoothSayer]

On Mon, 05 Mar 2012 19:38:03 -0800, Robert Baer <rober...@localnet.com>
wrote:

> You CANNOT find all of the documentation to do the hardware to make
>it possible.

Floppy support is a single chip and BIOS support. The reason we do not
see it any more is because mobo makers are not incorporating it, NOT
because it has been phased out to the point of not being able to be
implemented.

Most MOBOs WITH floppy support have quit supporting 2.88, even though it
merely amounts to a bit more BIOS space. The chips handle it fine.

Sadly, the 2.88 was the most reliable of the bunch.

[WoolyBully]

On Mon, 05 Mar 2012 19:38:03 -0800, Robert Baer <rober...@localnet.com>
wrote:

> The hardware since the Pentium removed the HARDWARE to do deleted
>sector R/W; write all the SOFTWARE you want and it ain't gonna werk.
> More recent hardware changes locked out the "B" floppy drive.
> Etc..

Bullshit. Same chip. Simply no longer added to the BIOS, and they are
no longer putting the header in either any more. The only thing you got
right.

[Chieftain of the Carpet Crawlers]

On Mon, 05 Mar 2012 19:38:59 -0800, Robert Baer <rober...@localnet.com>
wrote:

Fuck you baerass. I was putting the retard JanPan in his retarded
place.

If you are not also going senile, you should refrain from defending the
total ditz.

I wasn't talking to you, FUCKHEAD! So FUCK OFF AND DIE, BOY.

[WoolyBully]

On Mon, 05 Mar 2012 19:40:15 -0800, Robert Baer <rober...@localnet.com>
wrote:

It is a typo, dumbfuck.

Your common sense quotient is even lower than anyone else yet this
week.

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (5 Mar 2012 12:14:25 GMT) it happened Jasen Betts
<ja...@xnet.co.nz> wrote in <jj2an1$q6d$1...@reversiblemaps.ath.cx>:

>> but then why not release chip data? Could help them sell chips..
>
>http://www.farnell.com/datasheets/1521578.pdf (BCM2835 datasheet link
>on farnell RaspberryPi page)

Maybe you should actually READ the link you posted,
if you had done so you would notice it is just
ARM peripherals, and the word graphics isnot even in that document
All it says about 'display' is about ten lines of wide spaced text in 1.2.3 ARM physical addresses/
It is just so you can do DMA, USB, SPI, and UART,
Do a google search for RaspberryArch.jpg
that shows the closed source software architecture and 'binary blob'
secrets of the videocore IV GPU,
and then come back.

Would not even want to touch it.
Just a waste of time, they may change API anytime,
just like that v4l crap and the DVB-API.
Now fun to add anything to it, probably buggy as hell too.

[Martin Brown]

On 05/03/2012 11:29, Jan Panteltje wrote:
> On a sunny day (Mon, 05 Mar 2012 09:21:25 +0000) it happened Leroy Brown,
> the baddest man in the whole whole town, misspelled:
>
>> On 04/03/2012 11:58, Jan Panteltje wrote:
>>> Attacking the 35$ (not) computah.
>>>
>>> "To get people interested in computers and electronics"
>>> Then why not release the datasheet of the chips?
>>> A circuit diagram, full documentation too.
>>>
>>> So that is a joke.
>>>
>>> Sinclair came with the ZX80 in the eighties.
>>
>> You are rewriting history. Sinclair's first computer kit was the DIY
>> assembly MK14 based on the SC/MP microcontroller and launched in 1977.
>
> No, I am talking bout the ZX80 and ZX81.
> Not about how the wheel was invented.

Well the ZX80 was a really good joke. It merely provided a backdrop to
show just what a good job Acorn did with the BBC Micro. A machine that
could actually stand up to the hammer it got in a classroom full of kids.

The flimsy plastic of a ZX80 would break as soon as you looked at it.

>>> It was all TTL chips, and a Z80 processor.
>>> Now that was something.
>>> The ZX81 had some of that TTL integrated.
>>> Diagrams were available, I even had the complete ROM
>>> disassembly commented by Dr Ohara.
>>> THAT is how you get people interested,
>>> BBC micro was just like BBC, a government sponsored disaster,
>>
>> Rubbish. It was extremely successful and found everywhere.
>
> As far as I remember there was one person who had one in my
> country and he did not know how to use it ;-)

That you were too thick or dope crazed to work out how to use it does
not surprise me at all.

>
>> The BBC Micro graphics hardware at the time was so advanced that export
>> of them to Russia and East Germany was against COCOM rules!
>
> LOL, probably because it was virus infected.

Up to 640x200 2 colour graphics and 320x200 4 colour graphics with a
palette of 16. Viruses were largely unknown then. Worms did turn up on
mainframes and minis from time to time though.

>>> The ZX81 was available from the supermarket here (V&D).
>>
>> Sinclair's products were mostly noted for their naff keyboards starting
>> with the MK14 and getting worse and the dreaded QL microdrives which
>> would trash all your work in an instant given half a chance.
>
> The ZX80 and ZX81 used a cassette tape drive to load programs.
> Did you ever own one?
> Does not look like it.

No. I would not waste money on one.

I did own an SC/MP kit and an Acorn atom and had access to everything
else up to and including one of the first Apple Macs in the UK.

All home computers of that era were tape based storage. Microdrives came
later on the QL and were the absolute nadir of data security and
transportability. They were to all intents and purposes write only
devices that would stretch the tape loop and self destruct under even
light use. Add on disk drives were one of the things we all did.

Amstrad chopped Sinclairs legs off by doing a similar product to the QL
but with reliable floppy disks instead called PCW (or Joyce).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW#PCW_8256_and_8512

> Yes the foil keyboards were fragile, but not so fragile that I could not write a
> CP/M clone on it in asm, using a Sony cassette drive as storage,
> then I added IBM PC keyboard drivers..
> That foil keyboard was probably better for programming development
> than those rub screens you see nowadays, not to mention my 1000 Euro Samsung laptop
> keyboard where the space bar only works if you hit it in the middle.

So you buy crap computer kit as a hobby then even today.

> So Sir Sinclair really did a very good job compared to the crap that is made these days
> by clueless South Korean designers in half an hour before lunch time.
>
> You are just pissed because the BBC micro was such a flipping flop :-)

It was a huge success apart from in your deluded and deranged mind.

> The latter never
>> managed to sell the whole of the first production run of anything. It
>> wasn't as bad as the C5 which required application of C4 to make it go.
>>
>> I suspect there are still C5 body shells dumped in a yard somewhere.
>
> No idea what C4 and C5 is, I was talking about the ZX80 and ZX81 design.
> Absolutely revolutional.

C4 is a well known plastic explosive. Application to a C5 improved it.
The risible C5 was Uncle Clive's sit down on road bicycle with battery
assist (he called it an electric vehicle) and a monumental flop.

You can sometimes still find them at seaside resorts. Riding one on the
public roads protected only by a feeble red flag in the air was suicide.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_C5

I see you don't count using Google among your core skills either.

> That ZX80 ZX81 came with a very nice manual too, nice book.
> DOCUMENTATION, if you want to teach kids, that is where it starts,
>
> But I guess for some British gov peddler it is more falsifying news,
> that is where the BBC word comes in.
> Blairing Tony made it even worse.

[paranoid rant deleted]

You are completely insane. You should cut down on the drugs!

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Mon, 05 Mar 2012 16:13:22 -0500) it happened DJ Delorie
<d...@delorie.com> wrote in <xny5ree...@delorie.com>:

Next thing Breadcom and RatHead are charities too.
:-)

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Mon, 05 Mar 2012 16:26:49 -0500) it happened DJ Delorie
<d...@delorie.com> wrote in <xnty22e...@delorie.com>:

>The RPi is not about figuring out how the RPi itself works. The RPi is
>about figuring out how other things work. Do you have schematics for
>your desktop PC? Datasheets for that proprietary NVidia card? Do you
>even care what the USB electrical bitstream looks like? Or do you just
>plug compatible things into it and go from there?
>
>I had a ZX81. Built one or two expansion cards for it. Yes, I had the
>schematics, but other than the connector pinout they were not useful.
>
>> The RP has a proprietary ARM processor that one needs to sign an NDA
>> to obtain the full specs/programming info for.
>
>You don't need that level of detail to control the GPIO ports or a USB
>device. Since it's ARM, there's already enough documentation to do
>things I'd expect a 14-year old to do with it.

Wrong, see my other posting in the thread
comp.arch.embedded,aus.electronics,sci.electronics.design
maybe you know the solution?

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Mon, 05 Mar 2012 22:15:05 GMT) it happened ni...@puntnl.niks
(Nico Coesel) wrote in <4f553a20....@news.kpn.nl>:

>DJ Delorie <d...@delorie.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>Jan Panteltje <pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> writes:
>>> That limited stock huh?
>>> :_)
>>
>>Well, 10,000 units in the first run, and about 10X that for demand.
>>They say they're ramping up as fast as they can. They are, after all, a
>>charity.
>
>You also believe every promise a politician makes when elections are
>coming up? It is more likely that not a single unit has been assembled
>yet. Nobody knows until they actually get delivered.

Took 400 Euro to register a charity.
So that is 4 cent per unit worth of charity.
LOL

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Mon, 05 Mar 2012 18:53:42 -0500) it happened DJ Delorie
<d...@delorie.com> wrote in <xnmx7ue...@delorie.com>:

>
>I'm not an idiot, but I'm not a total cynic either. I know people who
>have held a RPi in their hands, and I'm part of the project to port
>Fedora to ARM

That was already clear to me, as you are a RatHead man.

> (the RPi runs Fedora, not Ubuntu - and Ubuntu does not
>*want* the RPi to even claim they run Ubuntu), so I'm slightly more of
>an "insider" than the average person.

Maybe you can shed light on how you will get the correct video synced frame rates:
http://linuxtv.org/pipermail/vdr/2008-July/017347.html

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Mon, 05 Mar 2012 19:28:38 -0800) it happened Robert Baer
<rober...@localnet.com> wrote in
<0KudnfeVPcn0GcjS...@posted.localnet>:

> Check and double check.
> At the Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley, early daze, when the
>apple FIRST came out it was a kit of boards and parts; a complete DIY
>that became so popular that the product morphed a number of times and
>the backers morphed also (into a company).
> Then there was an 8008 "kit" where one could get a manual that
>included full-size B&W "tapeouts" of each board, monitor listings, etc.
>Parts and boards were also available.
> Oh yeah..did i forget to mention the Altair 8080 the first full kit
>that cost about the same as the chocolate bar "chip"?
>
> Them wuz heady daze when one could actually learn ALL about a
>computer, literally from the inside out.

Yep, there was also the Motorola maxboard (if I remember the name correctly).
It was actually when some guys showed me that board when I decided to design
my own video digitizer so we could send slowscan video via the UART....
Designed a 6 bit digitizer eurocard size, TLL, and it worked!
Then somebody walked in and told me he did see an 8 bit 100% integrated
flash converter chip.
Things were going very fast then, a video frame store, with staggered RAM,
for speed, was a major project, I asked (a charity) for funding, but the
project was turned down. (It was supposed to be used to send live color pics
via the transatlantic phone line).
25 years later I met Mr Director again, they were doing it with PC
at a higher price then I had quoted, he looked at me and said:
"You proposed that back then did not you?"
I said:
"Yes, you missed an opportunity" (to make a couple of million perhaps).
Visions of where it goes.
Was a gratifying moment for me,

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Mon, 05 Mar 2012 19:38:03 -0800) it happened Robert Baer
<rober...@localnet.com> wrote in
<EYudnWPRUIUDG8jS...@posted.localnet>:

I desigend a 5 1/4 inch floppy controller that could do that with the Intel
floppy controller chip from the IBM PC.
Except that mine was driven from a Z80.
Some time ago I bought a USB floppy drive, so I could reflash my Tyan BIOS.....

[Jan Panteltje]

Leroi Brown:

>C4 is a well known plastic explosive. Application to a C5 improved it.

>>design someting

>No clue, red flag

Figures.
Why still post here? this was about computahs.
Try the pills the doctor gave you, not the ones from the pub.

[Andy Bartlett]

"Robert Baer" <rober...@localnet.com> wrote in message
news:EYudnZ3QUIW8GsjS...@posted.localnet...

Were talking UHF channel 36 here. The UK has been transmitting TV on UHF
since the mid 60's.

Dumbfuck.

[Joel Koltner]

DJ Delorie wrote:
> Joel Koltner<zapwire...@yahoo.com> writes:
>> The difference here is that the ZX80/81 had schematics and there was
>> nothing proprietary about it
>
> The ASIC design files were proprietary. The Z80 microcode and chip
> design was proprietary. The firmware sources were proprietary. Every
> computer has some line between "published" and "secret". So what if you
> don't have a pinout for the RPi mcu? There's no way you could solder to
> that tiny BGA anyway.

The idea is that, with the ZX81 (and Commodore 64 and Apple II and other
computers of that era), while it's true you didn't have the ASIC design
files, every register was documented so that your ability to have the
board do "cool things" was primarily limited by your own creativity
rather than due to entirely artificial constraints (i.e., a lack of
documentation). (Whereas, even if you had the ASIC design files, sure,
maybe you could modify them to add features, but this is now effectively
a new machine -- software you wrote to use those new features wouldn't
have been compatible with the millions of unaltered machines out on the
market already.)

Indeed, the software that was developed for these old 8-bit machines
*far* exceeded what the designers had initially ever envisioned for
them; I say that's directly a result of an open architecture where all
the registers are documented.

> I think we need to adjust our view of what the RPi is about - it's a
> COMPONENT in a bigger project. It's a TOY to learn Linux and embedded
> design with. It's an INTERFACE for other parts of your project. It's
> CHEAP enough to throw away if you accidentaly fry it. It comes with
> LINUX pre-installed so you don't have to worry about the low-level
> hardware anyway. RPi isn't targetting the 0.01% who want to get into
> chip design and writing hardware drivers. They're targetting the 1% who
> want to build things with them.

OK, that's fair enough. I'd like to see a disclaimer like that on their
web page... (especially since I'd estimate it's far more than 0.01% who
want to write hardware drivers, but of course this is pretty much
impossible to know right now).

> The RPi is not about figuring out how the RPi itself works. The RPi is
> about figuring out how other things work.

Hmm... when I first saw it my thought was definitely, "it'd be cool to
figure out how this board works so as to best apply it."

> Do you have schematics for
> your desktop PC? Datasheets for that proprietary NVidia card?

For my desktop PC, no, but I very much DO have schematics and datasheets
for the PC motherboards that are built into the instruments I design and
sell.

I would grant you, though, that as you go from relatively simple devices
like the RPi to more complex ones like a full-fledged PC motherboard,
the need for detailed low-level documentation does become less necessary
since the number of people who'll be programming at the lowest level
becomes pretty small. So I suppose this is another reflection that my
first thought about the RPi was that it was aimed at a somewhat
lower-level audience than it apparently really is.

> Do you
> even care what the USB electrical bitstream looks like?

Um, yes, yes I do. :-) I do look at them on occasion...

> I had a ZX81. Built one or two expansion cards for it. Yes, I had the
> schematics, but other than the connector pinout they were not useful.

Other than a few special pins the connector's pinout was just Z80 pins,
so the Z80 manual would have had all the timing diagrams.

---Joel

[Joerg]

Jan Panteltje wrote:
> Attacking the 35$ (not) computah.
>
> "To get people interested in computers and electronics"
> Then why not release the datasheet of the chips?

> A circuit diagram, full documentation too.
>

> So that is a joke.
>
> Sinclair came with the ZX80 in the eighties.

> It was all TTL chips, and a Z80 processor.

Yo, Jan, do you even remember what that thing cost? I as a student back
then could most definitely not afford either the ZX80 or the ZX81.
Neither could anyone else I knew. This was for rich kids only. I still
remember drooling all over an advertisement in a French paper, then
seeing a fat four-digit Franc number at the end. Went over to Hema and
bought myself a Cote-du-Rhone instead. That I could afford.

> Now that was something.
> The ZX81 had some of that TTL integrated.
> Diagrams were available, I even had the complete ROM
> disassembly commented by Dr Ohara.
> THAT is how you get people interested,
> BBC micro was just like BBC, a government sponsored disaster,

> It flipped.
> Sinclair became Sir Clive Sinclair, for his contributions
> to that what you now try to claim,
> I'd say to the youngsters:
> Get an old ZX80.
>

Nah. Get an older PC. Much better bang for the buck. In fact, it's not
all that difficult to get one for free.

> The whole thing from an educational POV makes no sense,
> as how many youngsters have a HDMI capable monitor?

This is the 21st century, last time I looked. Both flat screens here
have HDMI input. It avoids having to think about settings, something
that might be asking too much of kids these days. With HDMI, you plug it
in, and it worketh.

[...]

> The ZX81 was available from the supermarket here (V&D).
>

At what price?

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

[Corbomite Carrie]

On Tue, 06 Mar 2012 11:46:31 GMT, Jan Panteltje
<pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> wrote:

>Leroi Brown:
>>C4 is a well known plastic explosive. Application to a C5 improved it.
>
>>>design someting
>
>>No clue, red flag
>
>Figures.
>Why still post here?

WHy the fuck are you here, you fucking know nothing RETARD!?

> this was about computahs.


Your stupid made up term is even more retarded than you are.

>Try the pills the doctor gave you, not the ones from the pub.

Figure out the line length RULE yet, you retarded fuck?

[DJ Delorie]

Joerg <inv...@invalid.invalid> writes:
> Yo, Jan, do you even remember what that thing cost?

My ZX81 (TS1000) cost $99, not including the 16k ram pack.

My first car cost $100.

I got them about the same time.

Times have changed...

[Martin Brown]

On 06/03/2012 23:01, Joerg wrote:
> Jan Panteltje wrote:
>> Attacking the 35$ (not) computah.
>>
>> "To get people interested in computers and electronics"
>> Then why not release the datasheet of the chips?
>> A circuit diagram, full documentation too.
>>
>> So that is a joke.
>>
>> Sinclair came with the ZX80 in the eighties.
>> It was all TTL chips, and a Z80 processor.
>
> Yo, Jan, do you even remember what that thing cost? I as a student back
> then could most definitely not afford either the ZX80 or the ZX81.
> Neither could anyone else I knew. This was for rich kids only. I still

No it wasn't - at least not in the UK. The SC/MP was about £40-50 as a
kit and so was his scientific calculator before that. I think the ZX80
first launched at £100 and went up from there. I never got one because I
already had an Acorn Atom which was only £20 more in kit form. It wasn't
cheap but it wasn't unaffordable if you *really* wanted one.

The rich kids had Apples which were incredibly overpriced in the UK (and
arguably still are: think US $1 - £1 GB). Those of us that knew how to
make them do things got invited round and that was interesting.

> remember drooling all over an advertisement in a French paper, then
> seeing a fat four-digit Franc number at the end. Went over to Hema and
> bought myself a Cote-du-Rhone instead. That I could afford.

Shouldn't it have been about FF 1000 in those days?

>> Now that was something.
>> The ZX81 had some of that TTL integrated.
>> Diagrams were available, I even had the complete ROM
>> disassembly commented by Dr Ohara.
>> THAT is how you get people interested,
>> BBC micro was just like BBC, a government sponsored disaster,
>> It flipped.
>> Sinclair became Sir Clive Sinclair, for his contributions
>> to that what you now try to claim,
>> I'd say to the youngsters:
>> Get an old ZX80.
>
> Nah. Get an older PC. Much better bang for the buck. In fact, it's not
> all that difficult to get one for free.

Indeed. There are secondhand boxes for £50 over here which is less than
the cost of the XP OS license. The best second hand price performance in
the UK is about £100 which is good enough to do video rendering.

For a very long time an IBM PC in the UK cost around £2000 and slowly
improved in specification at or near constant price. Their comments
about 640k of ram being enough for anybody sound rather silly now...

>> The whole thing from an educational POV makes no sense,
>> as how many youngsters have a HDMI capable monitor?
>
> This is the 21st century, last time I looked. Both flat screens here
> have HDMI input. It avoids having to think about settings, something
> that might be asking too much of kids these days. With HDMI, you plug it
> in, and it worketh.

Almost any modern TV set has HDMI and digital works a lot better for
sharp text than either VGA or yuk! UHF modulators.

> [...]
>
>
>> The ZX81 was available from the supermarket here (V&D).
>
> At what price?

Dunno but in the UK about £69.95 (he always priced like that).
(so likely $99 at a guess)

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Tue, 06 Mar 2012 15:01:11 -0800) it happened Joerg
<inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote in <9rnj9...@mid.individual.net>:

>Jan Panteltje wrote:
>> Attacking the 35$ (not) computah.
>>
>> "To get people interested in computers and electronics"
>> Then why not release the datasheet of the chips?
>> A circuit diagram, full documentation too.
>>
>> So that is a joke.
>>
>> Sinclair came with the ZX80 in the eighties.
>> It was all TTL chips, and a Z80 processor.
>
>
>Yo, Jan, do you even remember what that thing cost? I as a student back
>then could most definitely not afford either the ZX80 or the ZX81.
>Neither could anyone else I knew. This was for rich kids only. I still
>remember drooling all over an advertisement in a French paper, then
>seeing a fat four-digit Franc number at the end. Went over to Hema and
>bought myself a Cote-du-Rhone instead. That I could afford.

Joerg, I do not remember the price, but it was not much.
But I was no student anymore at that time, so my perspective
of 'expensive' was different, I had my TV shop, and plenty of TVs to
try it on, scope, all equipment you can imagine to investigate it,
I remember writing a small program in that BASIC that printed repair
bills, added a serial printer interface for that, and actually
sold some of that soft.

>
>> Now that was something.
>> The ZX81 had some of that TTL integrated.
>> Diagrams were available, I even had the complete ROM
>> disassembly commented by Dr Ohara.
>> THAT is how you get people interested,
>> BBC micro was just like BBC, a government sponsored disaster,
>> It flipped.
>> Sinclair became Sir Clive Sinclair, for his contributions
>> to that what you now try to claim,
>> I'd say to the youngsters:
>> Get an old ZX80.
>>
>
>Nah. Get an older PC. Much better bang for the buck. In fact, it's not
>all that difficult to get one for free.

That is not the point, from a kids learning point of view you can learn
from the TTL circuit diagram how a real computer, plus the very clever video interface,
worked, and even rebuild it from scratch.
The very higly integrated chipsets of PeeSees these days would be a bit too much for most kids.

>
>> The whole thing from an educational POV makes no sense,
>> as how many youngsters have a HDMI capable monitor?
>
>
>This is the 21st century, last time I looked. Both flat screens here
>have HDMI input. It avoids having to think about settings, something
>that might be asking too much of kids these days. With HDMI, you plug it
>in, and it worketh.
>
>[...]
>
>
>> The ZX81 was available from the supermarket here (V&D).
>>
>
>At what price?

It really was not that much, the printer was much more expensive.

[Jasen Betts]

On 2012-03-06, Robert Baer <rober...@localnet.com> wrote:
> Andy Bartlett wrote:
>

>> Your both wrong. The ZX80 output was a modulated TV channel 36 monochrome
>> output. (Aztec UHF modulator IIRC).
>
> I do not think there was such a thing a s channel 36..been too long -
> think the tops was channel 13.

Depends where you are.... UK models were built for UHF 'cause that's
what UK tellys did, most of the rest of the world got VHF models.
because that's what their TVs did.

--
⚂⚃ 100% natural

[Martin Brown]

On 06/03/2012 03:40, Robert Baer wrote:
> Andy Bartlett wrote:
>> "Chieftain of the Carpet Crawlers"
>> <thesli...@thebarattheendoftheuniverse.org> wrote in message
>> news:76s6l71h2eqfsdfo8...@4ax.com...
>>> On Sun, 04 Mar 2012 11:58:15 GMT, Jan Panteltje
>>> <pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> The whole thing from an educational POV makes no sense,
>>>> as how many youngsters have a HDMI capable monitor?
>>>> The thing has no VGA.
>>>
>>>
>>> You're an idiot. In the "ZX80" days, there were CGA and VGA monitors.

That would be clever. VGA wasn't invented until later. Hercules graphics
and the good old 6847/6845 CGA was as good as it got back then. Beebon
let you choose which four colours from a palette of 16? (I forget). IBM
just had two different and equally naff colour schemes.

Japanese 9801 had the NEC7220 graphics coprocessor needed to support
kanji fonts and way ahead of its time but too expensive for the West.

>>> We didn't see you pissing and moaning for the folks who could only
>>> afford
>>> CGA.
>>>
>>> Many displays these days have HDMI input, you twit.
>>>
>>> One can also convert from HDMI to DVI.
>>>
>>> Got any other 100% retarded criticisms, idiot?
>>
>>
>> Your both wrong. The ZX80 output was a modulated TV channel 36 monochrome
>> output. (Aztec UHF modulator IIRC).
>>
>>
> I do not think there was such a thing a s channel 36..been too long -
> think the tops was channel 13.

Only in third world VHF TV countries. UK was on UHF by then.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

[Joerg]

DJ Delorie wrote:
> Joerg <inv...@invalid.invalid> writes:
>> Yo, Jan, do you even remember what that thing cost?
>
> My ZX81 (TS1000) cost $99, not including the 16k ram pack.
>

In Europe it listed just under 3000 French Francs. Which was IIRC well
over $500. Anyhow, way out of league for a student.

> My first car cost $100.
>

My first car (same time frame as the ZX80) was under $50.

> I got them about the same time.
>

I built my computational stuff out of TTL chips. Should have used CMOS
in hindsight but that was even more expensive. On my first project I
paid north of $20 for a 1kbit (yes, bit) SRAM. I'd liked to have two but
that wasn't in the cards.


> Times have changed...


Not always for the better. But regarding electronics and computing the
good old days are right now.

[Joerg]

Martin Brown wrote:
> On 06/03/2012 23:01, Joerg wrote:
>> Jan Panteltje wrote:
>>> Attacking the 35$ (not) computah.
>>>
>>> "To get people interested in computers and electronics"
>>> Then why not release the datasheet of the chips?
>>> A circuit diagram, full documentation too.
>>>
>>> So that is a joke.
>>>
>>> Sinclair came with the ZX80 in the eighties.
>>> It was all TTL chips, and a Z80 processor.
>>
>> Yo, Jan, do you even remember what that thing cost? I as a student back
>> then could most definitely not afford either the ZX80 or the ZX81.
>> Neither could anyone else I knew. This was for rich kids only. I still
>

> No it wasn't - at least not in the UK. The SC/MP was about ￜ40-50 as a

> kit and so was his scientific calculator before that. I think the ZX80

> first launched at ￜ100 and went up from there. I never got one because I
> already had an Acorn Atom which was only ￜ20 more in kit form. It wasn't

> cheap but it wasn't unaffordable if you *really* wanted one.
>
> The rich kids had Apples which were incredibly overpriced in the UK (and

> arguably still are: think US $1 - ￜ1 GB). Those of us that knew how to

> make them do things got invited round and that was interesting.
>

Apples were massively cloned in Germany and in the Netherlands. That
made them somewhat affordable. But the real ticket was to get to the US
and bring something back from there. If you were able to afford the
ticket, that is.

>> remember drooling all over an advertisement in a French paper, then
>> seeing a fat four-digit Franc number at the end. Went over to Hema and
>> bought myself a Cote-du-Rhone instead. That I could afford.
>
> Shouldn't it have been about FF 1000 in those days?
>

IIRC it was a lot higher. Anyway, not within my budget. Which wasn't too
bad because that meant I had to build my own hardware, and that was more
educational than anything I learned about computing and digital at the
university.

>>> Now that was something.
>>> The ZX81 had some of that TTL integrated.
>>> Diagrams were available, I even had the complete ROM
>>> disassembly commented by Dr Ohara.
>>> THAT is how you get people interested,
>>> BBC micro was just like BBC, a government sponsored disaster,
>>> It flipped.
>>> Sinclair became Sir Clive Sinclair, for his contributions
>>> to that what you now try to claim,
>>> I'd say to the youngsters:
>>> Get an old ZX80.
>>
>> Nah. Get an older PC. Much better bang for the buck. In fact, it's not
>> all that difficult to get one for free.
>

> Indeed. There are secondhand boxes for ￜ50 over here which is less than

> the cost of the XP OS license. The best second hand price performance in

> the UK is about ￜ100 which is good enough to do video rendering.
>
> For a very long time an IBM PC in the UK cost around ￜ2000 and slowly

> improved in specification at or near constant price. Their comments
> about 640k of ram being enough for anybody sound rather silly now...
>

I paid around 10,000 Deutschmarks for my Tandon 386. This did not
include the NEC MultiSync monitor which was another few thousand.

>>> The whole thing from an educational POV makes no sense,
>>> as how many youngsters have a HDMI capable monitor?
>>
>> This is the 21st century, last time I looked. Both flat screens here
>> have HDMI input. It avoids having to think about settings, something
>> that might be asking too much of kids these days. With HDMI, you plug it
>> in, and it worketh.
>
> Almost any modern TV set has HDMI and digital works a lot better for
> sharp text than either VGA or yuk! UHF modulators.
>

UHF modulators were only for the well-heeled. All I had was a drifty
VHF-I modulator.

>> [...]
>>
>>
>>> The ZX81 was available from the supermarket here (V&D).
>>
>> At what price?
>

> Dunno but in the UK about ￜ69.95 (he always priced like that).

> (so likely $99 at a guess)
>

I'd have bought it instantly at that price back then. But ...

[Joerg]

Jan Panteltje wrote:
> On a sunny day (Tue, 06 Mar 2012 15:01:11 -0800) it happened Joerg
> <inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote in <9rnj9...@mid.individual.net>:
>
>> Jan Panteltje wrote:
>>> Attacking the 35$ (not) computah.
>>>
>>> "To get people interested in computers and electronics"
>>> Then why not release the datasheet of the chips?
>>> A circuit diagram, full documentation too.
>>>
>>> So that is a joke.
>>>
>>> Sinclair came with the ZX80 in the eighties.
>>> It was all TTL chips, and a Z80 processor.
>>
>> Yo, Jan, do you even remember what that thing cost? I as a student back
>> then could most definitely not afford either the ZX80 or the ZX81.
>> Neither could anyone else I knew. This was for rich kids only. I still
>> remember drooling all over an advertisement in a French paper, then
>> seeing a fat four-digit Franc number at the end. Went over to Hema and
>> bought myself a Cote-du-Rhone instead. That I could afford.
>
> Joerg, I do not remember the price, but it was not much.
> But I was no student anymore at that time, so my perspective
> of 'expensive' was different, I had my TV shop, and plenty of TVs to
> try it on, scope, all equipment you can imagine to investigate it,
> I remember writing a small program in that BASIC that printed repair
> bills, added a serial printer interface for that, and actually
> sold some of that soft.
>

I even had a color TV in the early 80's because I rescued a Philips that
someone had tossed to the curb and repaired it. However, I could only
use it while nobody was cooking and the shower boiler was not heating up
because the whole apartment back at my time in NL was fused at 6A. One
circuit, that was it. Oh, and the HW100 ham radio transceiver had to be
off as well. Too many tubes.

>
>
>>> Now that was something.
>>> The ZX81 had some of that TTL integrated.
>>> Diagrams were available, I even had the complete ROM
>>> disassembly commented by Dr Ohara.
>>> THAT is how you get people interested,
>>> BBC micro was just like BBC, a government sponsored disaster,
>>> It flipped.
>>> Sinclair became Sir Clive Sinclair, for his contributions
>>> to that what you now try to claim,
>>> I'd say to the youngsters:
>>> Get an old ZX80.
>>>
>> Nah. Get an older PC. Much better bang for the buck. In fact, it's not
>> all that difficult to get one for free.
>
> That is not the point, from a kids learning point of view you can learn
> from the TTL circuit diagram how a real computer, plus the very clever video interface,
> worked, and even rebuild it from scratch.
> The very higly integrated chipsets of PeeSees these days would be a bit too much for most kids.
>

Back then PCs were very simple. And much more versatile than a Sinclair.
You could build your own interface cards. I bought a book "Top-Training
for Turbo-Pascal" that even came with a Vero/Vector style ISA card.

Of course, to use it I had to beg time at other people's PCs or wait
until I visited my parents because dad always had the latest and
greatest computing stuff from IBM.

[...]

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Wed, 07 Mar 2012 10:30:13 -0800) it happened Joerg
<inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote in <9rpnpr...@mid.individual.net>:

>Back then PCs were very simple. And much more versatile than a Sinclair.

I am not sure you got the time table right.

Lets check:
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_ZX80
that was 1980.

IBM PC:
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer
August 1981

I know this, because AFTER I did that program in BASIC one companion
in my company wanted to buy an IBM, the IBM was +++++more expensive

>You could build your own interface cards. I bought a book "Top-Training
>for Turbo-Pascal" that even came with a Vero/Vector style ISA card.

After I sold the TV shop I went, after several other things,
to work in the late eighties for a company where I just did that,
ISA cards, I invented the wave table soundcard, suggested Boss patented it,
he did not, an other missed opportunity,
Mostly the rest was special I/O stuff, huge amounts of I/O
we only used IBM, no clones,
Then ISA was replaced by what was micro channel bus... sort of flopped.

I remember one project that I did with that IBM PC got a lot of press
and TV coverage, and caused a stir with IBM dealers as we 'bypassed'
them and got the stuff directly from IBM, but were no official dealer,
They came and my boss told them 'would you rather have that we did it with
a clone?"
LOL

BTW I still have a PC with one ISA slot, some PCI slots and floppy drive.
I do not have those large ISA prototype cards anymore, but still a Philips
ISA video PAL receiver card.

[Joerg]

Jan Panteltje wrote:
> On a sunny day (Wed, 07 Mar 2012 10:30:13 -0800) it happened Joerg
> <inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote in <9rpnpr...@mid.individual.net>:
>
>> Back then PCs were very simple. And much more versatile than a Sinclair.
>
> I am not sure you got the time table right.
>
> Lets check:
> http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_ZX80
> that was 1980.
>
> IBM PC:
> http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer
> August 1981
>

That was not the first personal computer fropm IBM. For example, we had
this one (it's actually still there):

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/pc/pc_3.html

Mid 70's.

> I know this, because AFTER I did that program in BASIC one companion
> in my company wanted to buy an IBM, the IBM was +++++more expensive
>

Not if one works at IBM and gets an employee discount :-)

>
>> You could build your own interface cards. I bought a book "Top-Training
>> for Turbo-Pascal" that even came with a Vero/Vector style ISA card.
>
> After I sold the TV shop I went, after several other things,
> to work in the late eighties for a company where I just did that,
> ISA cards, I invented the wave table soundcard, suggested Boss patented it,
> he did not, an other missed opportunity,

Had that happen as well. Brainstorm meeting, the whole company. Theme:
What else could we do with ultrasound? Only requirement was absolutely
no laughing about ideas of others.

So I and a few other guys came up with an idea we thought was grandiose:
The sonic toothbrush! Thundering laughter, people slapping their knees,
falling off chairs. Needless to say, nothing came of this meeting. Five
years later Philips started making oodles of money with ... a sonic
toothbrush (we have them).

> Mostly the rest was special I/O stuff, huge amounts of I/O
> we only used IBM, no clones,
> Then ISA was replaced by what was micro channel bus... sort of flopped.
>

It had to and I predicted it (to IBM folks). Only open architectures can
win in this market.

> I remember one project that I did with that IBM PC got a lot of press
> and TV coverage, and caused a stir with IBM dealers as we 'bypassed'
> them and got the stuff directly from IBM, but were no official dealer,
> They came and my boss told them 'would you rather have that we did it with
> a clone?"
> LOL
>
> BTW I still have a PC with one ISA slot, some PCI slots and floppy drive.
> I do not have those large ISA prototype cards anymore, but still a Philips
> ISA video PAL receiver card.
>

You can still buy all sorts of new PC with ISA, because of heavy
industrial use. They are here to stay.

[k...@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz]

On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 12:54:55 -0800, Joerg <inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote:

>Jan Panteltje wrote:
>> On a sunny day (Wed, 07 Mar 2012 10:30:13 -0800) it happened Joerg
>> <inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote in <9rpnpr...@mid.individual.net>:
>>
>>> Back then PCs were very simple. And much more versatile than a Sinclair.
>>
>> I am not sure you got the time table right.
>>
>> Lets check:
>> http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_ZX80
>> that was 1980.
>>
>> IBM PC:
>> http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer
>> August 1981
>>
>
>That was not the first personal computer fropm IBM. For example, we had
>this one (it's actually still there):
>
>http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/pc/pc_3.html
>
>Mid 70's.

At the price, it was about as "personal" as a PDP-11. We had a bunch of them
that we had a coop student build from the BOM, too. ;-)

>
>> I know this, because AFTER I did that program in BASIC one companion
>> in my company wanted to buy an IBM, the IBM was +++++more expensive
>>
>
>Not if one works at IBM and gets an employee discount :-)

Well, there is that. ;-) Mine, a 5150, one floppy, 48K (the minimum employee
purchase), monochrome, and a CGA graphics card (no display) was about $2500.

>>
>>> You could build your own interface cards. I bought a book "Top-Training
>>> for Turbo-Pascal" that even came with a Vero/Vector style ISA card.
>>
>> After I sold the TV shop I went, after several other things,
>> to work in the late eighties for a company where I just did that,
>> ISA cards, I invented the wave table soundcard, suggested Boss patented it,
>> he did not, an other missed opportunity,
>
>
>Had that happen as well. Brainstorm meeting, the whole company. Theme:
>What else could we do with ultrasound? Only requirement was absolutely
>no laughing about ideas of others.
>
>So I and a few other guys came up with an idea we thought was grandiose:
>The sonic toothbrush! Thundering laughter, people slapping their knees,
>falling off chairs. Needless to say, nothing came of this meeting. Five
>years later Philips started making oodles of money with ... a sonic
>toothbrush (we have them).
>
>
>> Mostly the rest was special I/O stuff, huge amounts of I/O
>> we only used IBM, no clones,
>> Then ISA was replaced by what was micro channel bus... sort of flopped.
>>
>
>It had to and I predicted it (to IBM folks). Only open architectures can
>win in this market.

The problem was that ISA couldn't win in IBMs market. As we saw with advent
of PCI, later, they were right. The greater market wasn't ready for the
integration of microchannel, though.

>> I remember one project that I did with that IBM PC got a lot of press
>> and TV coverage, and caused a stir with IBM dealers as we 'bypassed'
>> them and got the stuff directly from IBM, but were no official dealer,
>> They came and my boss told them 'would you rather have that we did it with
>> a clone?"
>> LOL
>>
>> BTW I still have a PC with one ISA slot, some PCI slots and floppy drive.
>> I do not have those large ISA prototype cards anymore, but still a Philips
>> ISA video PAL receiver card.
>>
>
>You can still buy all sorts of new PC with ISA, because of heavy
>industrial use. They are here to stay.

If you have enough money.

[Joerg]

k...@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz wrote:
> On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 12:54:55 -0800, Joerg <inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>
>> Jan Panteltje wrote:
>>> On a sunny day (Wed, 07 Mar 2012 10:30:13 -0800) it happened Joerg
>>> <inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote in <9rpnpr...@mid.individual.net>:
>>>

[...]

>>> I know this, because AFTER I did that program in BASIC one companion
>>> in my company wanted to buy an IBM, the IBM was +++++more expensive
>>>
>> Not if one works at IBM and gets an employee discount :-)
>
> Well, there is that. ;-) Mine, a 5150, one floppy, 48K (the minimum employee
> purchase), monochrome, and a CGA graphics card (no display) was about $2500.

A lot of money. However, considering that I paid north of two bucks for
a SN7400 back then it was not outrageous at all. Also, you got a dang
reliable and sturdy computation machine for that and not some flimsy
foil keyboard like with the Sinclair.

>>>> You could build your own interface cards. I bought a book "Top-Training
>>>> for Turbo-Pascal" that even came with a Vero/Vector style ISA card.
>>> After I sold the TV shop I went, after several other things,
>>> to work in the late eighties for a company where I just did that,
>>> ISA cards, I invented the wave table soundcard, suggested Boss patented it,
>>> he did not, an other missed opportunity,
>>
>> Had that happen as well. Brainstorm meeting, the whole company. Theme:
>> What else could we do with ultrasound? Only requirement was absolutely
>> no laughing about ideas of others.
>>
>> So I and a few other guys came up with an idea we thought was grandiose:
>> The sonic toothbrush! Thundering laughter, people slapping their knees,
>> falling off chairs. Needless to say, nothing came of this meeting. Five
>> years later Philips started making oodles of money with ... a sonic
>> toothbrush (we have them).
>>
>>
>>> Mostly the rest was special I/O stuff, huge amounts of I/O
>>> we only used IBM, no clones,
>>> Then ISA was replaced by what was micro channel bus... sort of flopped.
>>>
>> It had to and I predicted it (to IBM folks). Only open architectures can
>> win in this market.
>

> The problem was that ISA couldn't win in IBMs market. ...


ISA won, big time. To this day it is heavily used in industrial
applications and you can buy new PCs with numerous ISA slots. When the
ICT on one of my projects croaked (after humming along for almost 15
years ...) the client simply bought a new ISA-PC and it was humming
again. Except now they have a CD-writer in there which makes backup easier.


> ... As we saw with advent of PCI, later, they were right. ...


PCI isn't used so much in automation. Sometimes, yes, but a lot is still
ISA.

http://www.nixsys.com/products/accessories/motherboards/nx853.html


> ... The greater market wasn't ready for the
> integration of microchannel, though.
>

AFAIR they kept it proprietary. That was the cardinal mistake.

>>> I remember one project that I did with that IBM PC got a lot of press
>>> and TV coverage, and caused a stir with IBM dealers as we 'bypassed'
>>> them and got the stuff directly from IBM, but were no official dealer,
>>> They came and my boss told them 'would you rather have that we did it with
>>> a clone?"
>>> LOL
>>>
>>> BTW I still have a PC with one ISA slot, some PCI slots and floppy drive.
>>> I do not have those large ISA prototype cards anymore, but still a Philips
>>> ISA video PAL receiver card.
>>>
>> You can still buy all sorts of new PC with ISA, because of heavy
>> industrial use. They are here to stay.
>
> If you have enough money.

Nah, see link above. Most ISA mobos and cards are in the $200-$300
range. Peanuts if that makes a production line stop situation go away.

If someone is really hard-pressed for money they can get stuff from China:

http://www.alibaba.com/product-free/254659876/ISA_CARD.html

[WoolyBully]

On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 12:54:55 -0800, Joerg <inv...@invalid.invalid>
wrote:

>

>You can still buy all sorts of new PC with ISA, because of heavy
>industrial use. They are here to stay.
>
>[...]
>
>--
>Regards, Joerg

You are full of shit. Cite your "new" PC with ISA slots, motherfucker.

[k...@att.bizzz]

On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 14:21:21 -0800, Joerg <inv...@invalid.invalid>
wrote:

>k...@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz wrote:
>> On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 12:54:55 -0800, Joerg <inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>>
>>> Jan Panteltje wrote:
>>>> On a sunny day (Wed, 07 Mar 2012 10:30:13 -0800) it happened Joerg
>>>> <inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote in <9rpnpr...@mid.individual.net>:
>>>>
>
>[...]
>
>>>> I know this, because AFTER I did that program in BASIC one companion
>>>> in my company wanted to buy an IBM, the IBM was +++++more expensive
>>>>
>>> Not if one works at IBM and gets an employee discount :-)
>>
>> Well, there is that. ;-) Mine, a 5150, one floppy, 48K (the minimum employee
>> purchase), monochrome, and a CGA graphics card (no display) was about $2500.
>
>
>A lot of money. However, considering that I paid north of two bucks for
>a SN7400 back then it was not outrageous at all. Also, you got a dang
>reliable and sturdy computation machine for that and not some flimsy
>foil keyboard like with the Sinclair.

It was a lot of money, in 1982. Almost as much as my HP45 in 1973.
;-)

>>>>> You could build your own interface cards. I bought a book "Top-Training
>>>>> for Turbo-Pascal" that even came with a Vero/Vector style ISA card.
>>>> After I sold the TV shop I went, after several other things,
>>>> to work in the late eighties for a company where I just did that,
>>>> ISA cards, I invented the wave table soundcard, suggested Boss patented it,
>>>> he did not, an other missed opportunity,
>>>
>>> Had that happen as well. Brainstorm meeting, the whole company. Theme:
>>> What else could we do with ultrasound? Only requirement was absolutely
>>> no laughing about ideas of others.
>>>
>>> So I and a few other guys came up with an idea we thought was grandiose:
>>> The sonic toothbrush! Thundering laughter, people slapping their knees,
>>> falling off chairs. Needless to say, nothing came of this meeting. Five
>>> years later Philips started making oodles of money with ... a sonic
>>> toothbrush (we have them).
>>>
>>>
>>>> Mostly the rest was special I/O stuff, huge amounts of I/O
>>>> we only used IBM, no clones,
>>>> Then ISA was replaced by what was micro channel bus... sort of flopped.
>>>>
>>> It had to and I predicted it (to IBM folks). Only open architectures can
>>> win in this market.
>>
>> The problem was that ISA couldn't win in IBMs market. ...
>
>
>ISA won, big time.

Not in the market IBM was after. Micorchannel was successful until
PCI worked well enough to replace it.

>to this day it is heavily used in industrial

>applications and you can buy new PCs with numerous ISA slots.

Where you have armies of specialists who can figure out crap like
address and IRQ conflicts.

> When the
>ICT on one of my projects croaked (after humming along for almost 15
>years ...) the client simply bought a new ISA-PC and it was humming
>again. Except now they have a CD-writer in there which makes backup easier.


>> ... As we saw with advent of PCI, later, they were right. ...
>
>
>PCI isn't used so much in automation. Sometimes, yes, but a lot is still
>ISA.

Irrelevant.

>http://www.nixsys.com/products/accessories/motherboards/nx853.html
>
>
>> ... The greater market wasn't ready for the
>> integration of microchannel, though.
>>
>
>AFAIR they kept it proprietary. That was the cardinal mistake.

That's wrong. But thanks for playing.

>>>> I remember one project that I did with that IBM PC got a lot of press
>>>> and TV coverage, and caused a stir with IBM dealers as we 'bypassed'
>>>> them and got the stuff directly from IBM, but were no official dealer,
>>>> They came and my boss told them 'would you rather have that we did it with
>>>> a clone?"
>>>> LOL
>>>>
>>>> BTW I still have a PC with one ISA slot, some PCI slots and floppy drive.
>>>> I do not have those large ISA prototype cards anymore, but still a Philips
>>>> ISA video PAL receiver card.
>>>>
>>> You can still buy all sorts of new PC with ISA, because of heavy
>>> industrial use. They are here to stay.
>>
>> If you have enough money.
>
>
>Nah, see link above. Most ISA mobos and cards are in the $200-$300
>range. Peanuts if that makes a production line stop situation go away.

And competitive cards are $20.

[josephkk]

On Mon, 05 Mar 2012 15:41:14 -0500, DJ Delorie <d...@delorie.com> wrote:

>
>Jan Panteltje <pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> writes:

>> The ZX80 / ZX81 / ZXspectrum had RF out for connection to any teafee
>> set at that time
>
>The Raspberry Pi has an HDMI output for connection to any TV set of
>*its* time :-)

Not mine. Not HD.
>
>> It also had a keyboard.
>
>RP uses a standard $5 USB keyboard. I have a stack of them.
>
>> And one of the best BASICs (Dartmouth) with syntax checking on entry
>> of a line. You could program it in asm too.
>
>RP uses state-of-the-arg gcc plus EVERY OTHER language you can get for
>Linux. FORTRAN? Pascal? Lisp? Perl? Python? ASM? Turtle graphics?
>All there, and it all runs on the RP.
>
>> So the kids could connect it to the teafee in the living room
>> and fight for access versus other shows.
>
>RP can do that too.
>
>> It would still work on 90% of the teafees out there today.
>
>RP's work on 90% of the TVs out today.
>
>> It came with power supply.
>
>RP uses standard cell phone power supplies. I have a dozen around here.
>
>> Within a very short time a zillion extension things were on the market,
>
>RP is hoping that happens again. Arduino certainly saw that happen.
>
>> I had for example, a nice 64 kB dynamic ram module that plugged into
>> it. The bus was accessible on the back side.
>
>RP has 256 Meg of ram, and the "bus" is USB, but there are other
>connections on the RP too.
>
>> I am not arguing that that 100$ alias 35$ thingy is a real computah,
>
>I see no evidence of a $100 price anywhere...
>
>> I state that its educational value and especially its electronic
>> educational value is zero compared to what Sir Clive brought, same
>> from the value for money
>
>A third the price, a lot more functionality, and you say it's value is
>zero?

Read more carefully.
>
>> plenty of time to make at least a decent diagram and provide links to
>
>Hey look! A decent diagram and links: http://elinux.org/Rpi_Hardware
>
>> It is all hype and not worth a dime.
>
>Then don't buy it, more for us.

[josephkk]

On Mon, 05 Mar 2012 19:28:38 -0800, Robert Baer <rober...@localnet.com>
wrote:

>Jan Panteltje wrote:
>> Attacking the 35$ (not) computah.
>>
>> "To get people interested in computers and electronics"
>> Then why not release the datasheet of the chips?
>> A circuit diagram, full documentation too.
>>
>> So that is a joke.
>>
>> Sinclair came with the ZX80 in the eighties.
>> It was all TTL chips, and a Z80 processor.

>> Now that was something.
>> The ZX81 had some of that TTL integrated.
>> Diagrams were available, I even had the complete ROM
>> disassembly commented by Dr Ohara.
>> THAT is how you get people interested,
>> BBC micro was just like BBC, a government sponsored disaster,
>> It flipped.
>> Sinclair became Sir Clive Sinclair, for his contributions
>> to that what you now try to claim,
>> I'd say to the youngsters:
>> Get an old ZX80.
>>

>> The whole thing from an educational POV makes no sense,
>> as how many youngsters have a HDMI capable monitor?

>> The thing has no VGA.
>>

>> It is just a marketing thing, maybe it was only a Broadcom evaluation board,
>> but then why not release chip data? Could help them sell chips..
>> So that does not make sense.
>> Of course it bytes into the profit margin of everyone else that sells
>> cheap single board computahs...
>> Farnell only sells to companies, maybe be RS will sell to an individual...
>> CHILD???? Oh man, for that to happen they must be in the shop window
>> before Christmas... LOL and then it will be 70 $ plus a mouse,
>> plus a HDMI monitor, plus a keyboard, plus an USB hub, plus plus...
>> Oh, power supply too? Or does it come with one?
>> Don't think so.
>>
>> So, overall its hype, hype more hype, and did I mention HYPE?

>>
>> The ZX81 was available from the supermarket here (V&D).
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>

> Check and double check.
> At the Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley, early daze, when the
>apple FIRST came out it was a kit of boards and parts; a complete DIY
>that became so popular that the product morphed a number of times and
>the backers morphed also (into a company).
> Then there was an 8008 "kit" where one could get a manual that
>included full-size B&W "tapeouts" of each board, monitor listings, etc.
>Parts and boards were also available.
> Oh yeah..did i forget to mention the Altair 8080 the first full kit
>that cost about the same as the chocolate bar "chip"?
>
> Them wuz heady daze when one could actually learn ALL about a
>computer, literally from the inside out.

No! The really heady days were before that. Back when computahs were
made of transistors. I worked with such beasts. That is when you could
really really learn how everything built up to a computah. The next
version that i worked with was full of SSI and MSI TTL, early 1970s bit
slicey stuff. Bit slice was popular because it was the most workable
solution at the time, and it brought us microprogramming (Register
transfer language [RTL]) and higher abstraction levels. Then uCs and
Conway-Meade hit. VHDL is a direct descendant. Now we are pushing over
10 billion transistors on a single small chip.

?-)

[Jasen Betts]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=isa+computer+new

--
⚂⚃ 100% natural

--- Posted via news://freenews.netfront.net/ - Complaints to ne...@netfront.net ---

[Martin Brown]

On 08/03/2012 04:06, k...@att.bizzz wrote:
> On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 14:21:21 -0800, Joerg<inv...@invalid.invalid>
> wrote:
>
>> k...@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz wrote:
>>> On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 12:54:55 -0800, Joerg<inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Jan Panteltje wrote:

>>>>> Mostly the rest was special I/O stuff, huge amounts of I/O
>>>>> we only used IBM, no clones,
>>>>> Then ISA was replaced by what was micro channel bus... sort of flopped.
>>>>>
>>>> It had to and I predicted it (to IBM folks). Only open architectures can
>>>> win in this market.
>>>
>>> The problem was that ISA couldn't win in IBMs market. ...
>>
>> ISA won, big time.
>
> Not in the market IBM was after. Micorchannel was successful until
> PCI worked well enough to replace it.

The only thing that microchannel succeeding in doing was to get all the
other makers to club together and define EISA. We abandoned IBM PS/2s as
the dedicated instrument control hardware would not fit in them and
re-engineering all of it to be locked into IBM only did not appeal.

Compaq were delighted as were Dell and Intel OEM. I did at the time
still believe that OS/2 was the way forward (even on Compaqs) but the
botched launch of the PS/2 hardware in the UK was conflated with OS/2.
We did use it for a while very successfully but alas it did not become
mainstream and Windows3 stole the show at the consumer and office end.

>> to this day it is heavily used in industrial
>> applications and you can buy new PCs with numerous ISA slots.
>
> Where you have armies of specialists who can figure out crap like
> address and IRQ conflicts.

Old ISA boards were heavily dependent on DIP switches and jumpers and
could be a nightmare to set up correctly. More so if you lost the manual
and they all provided an RTC or extra parallel port at the "right"
address and enabled by default.

>>> ... The greater market wasn't ready for the
>>> integration of microchannel, though.
>>>
>>
>> AFAIR they kept it proprietary. That was the cardinal mistake.
>
> That's wrong. But thanks for playing.

They made the price of entry to MCA high enough that moving to their
competitors PCs instead became immediately attractive to their
industrial and scientific users. VGA was a lot better, but we were
already standardised on a 7220 based card that could do 1024x1024.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Wed, 07 Mar 2012 12:54:55 -0800) it happened Joerg
<inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote in <9rq095...@mid.individual.net>:

>Jan Panteltje wrote:
>> On a sunny day (Wed, 07 Mar 2012 10:30:13 -0800) it happened Joerg
>> <inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote in <9rpnpr...@mid.individual.net>:
>>
>>> Back then PCs were very simple. And much more versatile than a Sinclair.
>>
>> I am not sure you got the time table right.
>>
>> Lets check:
>> http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_ZX80
>> that was 1980.
>>
>> IBM PC:
>> http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer
>> August 1981
>>
>

>That was not the first personal computer from IBM. For example, we had

>this one (it's actually still there):
>
>http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/pc/pc_3.html
>
>Mid 70's.

Oh, if you go that way, where I worked we had a PDP10 in those days.

>
>> I know this, because AFTER I did that program in BASIC one companion
>> in my company wanted to buy an IBM, the IBM was +++++more expensive
>>
>
>Not if one works at IBM and gets an employee discount :-)

Did you?

In that eighties thing we had an IBM mainframe too.
2 techs from that club came to work on it if there was a problem.
Very special kind of people, reminds me of some FBI character fun movie.

All about image selling...

>>> You could build your own interface cards. I bought a book "Top-Training
>>> for Turbo-Pascal" that even came with a Vero/Vector style ISA card.
>>
>> After I sold the TV shop I went, after several other things,
>> to work in the late eighties for a company where I just did that,
>> ISA cards, I invented the wave table soundcard, suggested Boss patented it,
>> he did not, an other missed opportunity,
>
>
>Had that happen as well. Brainstorm meeting, the whole company. Theme:
>What else could we do with ultrasound? Only requirement was absolutely
>no laughing about ideas of others.
>
>So I and a few other guys came up with an idea we thought was grandiose:
>The sonic toothbrush! Thundering laughter, people slapping their knees,
>falling off chairs. Needless to say, nothing came of this meeting. Five
>years later Philips started making oodles of money with ... a sonic
>toothbrush (we have them).

mmm never used one.
What does it do to the brain?
I did some experiments with ultrasound, probably more power.
Blew up about 10 piezo tweeters in the process.
Chased away birs and other life forms.
To be more precise drug addicted youth.
Sort of worked....
Older people could not hear it.
Last week I tested how far I could still hear.
15 kHz no problem, above that ...
Still pretty good I think.

>> Mostly the rest was special I/O stuff, huge amounts of I/O
>> we only used IBM, no clones,
>> Then ISA was replaced by what was micro channel bus... sort of flopped.
>>
>
>It had to and I predicted it (to IBM folks). Only open architectures can
>win in this market.

I think it was their defense against the clones.

>You can still buy all sorts of new PC with ISA, because of heavy
>industrial use. They are here to stay.

Yes, do not know of any of that ISA stuff I made is still being used,
but that sort of PCs would come in handy.

[JW]

On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 19:16:58 -0800 WoolyBully
<Wooly...@arcticicemasses.org> wrote in Message id:
<449gl7l2pluuks86h...@4ax.com>:

The industrial market is still going strong with ISA.

http://www.ieiworld.com/product_groups/industrial/content.aspx?keyword=imba-g410&gid=00001000010000000001&cid=08141335210245676258&id=0A279642502930771045
http://www.ieiworld.com/product_groups/industrial/content.aspx?gid=00001000010000000001&cid=08125382838799952161&id=0A137704606015564840
http://usa.ieiworld.com/product_groups/industrial/list.aspx?gid=00001000010000000001&cid=08125380802604740685

Now Google PICMG 1.0, Dum-Dum.

[WoolyBully]

On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 06:12:15 -0500, JW <no...@dev.null> wrote:

>The industrial market is still going strong with ISA.

Industrial computers are not "PC"s

[Joerg]

k...@att.bizzz wrote:
> On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 14:21:21 -0800, Joerg <inv...@invalid.invalid>
> wrote:
>
>> k...@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz wrote:
>>> On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 12:54:55 -0800, Joerg <inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Jan Panteltje wrote:
>>>>> On a sunny day (Wed, 07 Mar 2012 10:30:13 -0800) it happened Joerg
>>>>> <inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote in <9rpnpr...@mid.individual.net>:
>>>>>

[...]

>>>>>> You could build your own interface cards. I bought a book "Top-Training
>>>>>> for Turbo-Pascal" that even came with a Vero/Vector style ISA card.
>>>>> After I sold the TV shop I went, after several other things,
>>>>> to work in the late eighties for a company where I just did that,
>>>>> ISA cards, I invented the wave table soundcard, suggested Boss patented it,
>>>>> he did not, an other missed opportunity,
>>>> Had that happen as well. Brainstorm meeting, the whole company. Theme:
>>>> What else could we do with ultrasound? Only requirement was absolutely
>>>> no laughing about ideas of others.
>>>>
>>>> So I and a few other guys came up with an idea we thought was grandiose:
>>>> The sonic toothbrush! Thundering laughter, people slapping their knees,
>>>> falling off chairs. Needless to say, nothing came of this meeting. Five
>>>> years later Philips started making oodles of money with ... a sonic
>>>> toothbrush (we have them).
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> Mostly the rest was special I/O stuff, huge amounts of I/O
>>>>> we only used IBM, no clones,
>>>>> Then ISA was replaced by what was micro channel bus... sort of flopped.
>>>>>
>>>> It had to and I predicted it (to IBM folks). Only open architectures can
>>>> win in this market.
>>> The problem was that ISA couldn't win in IBMs market. ...
>>
>> ISA won, big time.
>
> Not in the market IBM was after. Micorchannel was successful until
> PCI worked well enough to replace it.
>

I can only say it for Europe but over there Microchannel totally
flopped. Vendor lock is usually a bad strategy.

>> to this day it is heavily used in industrial
>> applications and you can buy new PCs with numerous ISA slots.
>
> Where you have armies of specialists who can figure out crap like
> address and IRQ conflicts.
>

Au contraire. It's so bone-simple that lots of production equipment runs
forever on ISA. The cards hardly ever croak and if one does you just
replace it.

>> When the
>> ICT on one of my projects croaked (after humming along for almost 15
>> years ...) the client simply bought a new ISA-PC and it was humming
>> again. Except now they have a CD-writer in there which makes backup easier.
>
>
>>> ... As we saw with advent of PCI, later, they were right. ...
>>
>> PCI isn't used so much in automation. Sometimes, yes, but a lot is still
>> ISA.
>
> Irrelevant.
>

Not to the industry.

>> http://www.nixsys.com/products/accessories/motherboards/nx853.html
>>
>>
>>> ... The greater market wasn't ready for the
>>> integration of microchannel, though.
>>>
>> AFAIR they kept it proprietary. That was the cardinal mistake.
>
> That's wrong. But thanks for playing.
>

Only repeating what IT folks told me. But that was in Europe, no idea
about the US back then.

>>>>> I remember one project that I did with that IBM PC got a lot of press
>>>>> and TV coverage, and caused a stir with IBM dealers as we 'bypassed'
>>>>> them and got the stuff directly from IBM, but were no official dealer,
>>>>> They came and my boss told them 'would you rather have that we did it with
>>>>> a clone?"
>>>>> LOL
>>>>>
>>>>> BTW I still have a PC with one ISA slot, some PCI slots and floppy drive.
>>>>> I do not have those large ISA prototype cards anymore, but still a Philips
>>>>> ISA video PAL receiver card.
>>>>>
>>>> You can still buy all sorts of new PC with ISA, because of heavy
>>>> industrial use. They are here to stay.
>>> If you have enough money.
>>
>> Nah, see link above. Most ISA mobos and cards are in the $200-$300
>> range. Peanuts if that makes a production line stop situation go away.
>
> And competitive cards are $20.
>

Those are largely junk. I was fighting one last week. Heck, they did not
even properly ground the USB jacks on that PCI card. Usually you get
what you pay for. And in production equipment a delta of a couple
hundred bucks for a one-time expense is really irrelevant. Definitely if
it controls a half-million Dollar machine.

[...]

[Joerg]

ROFL! That was a good one ...

[Joerg]

Jan Panteltje wrote:
> On a sunny day (Wed, 07 Mar 2012 12:54:55 -0800) it happened Joerg
> <inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote in <9rq095...@mid.individual.net>:
>
>> Jan Panteltje wrote:
>>> On a sunny day (Wed, 07 Mar 2012 10:30:13 -0800) it happened Joerg
>>> <inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote in <9rpnpr...@mid.individual.net>:
>>>
>>>> Back then PCs were very simple. And much more versatile than a Sinclair.
>>> I am not sure you got the time table right.
>>>
>>> Lets check:
>>> http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_ZX80
>>> that was 1980.
>>>
>>> IBM PC:
>>> http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer
>>> August 1981
>>>
>> That was not the first personal computer from IBM. For example, we had
>> this one (it's actually still there):
>>
>> http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/pc/pc_3.html
>>
>> Mid 70's.
>
> Oh, if you go that way, where I worked we had a PDP10 in those days.
>
>
>
>>> I know this, because AFTER I did that program in BASIC one companion
>>> in my company wanted to buy an IBM, the IBM was +++++more expensive
>>>
>> Not if one works at IBM and gets an employee discount :-)
>
> Did you?
>

No, but a family member. So I did not have my own PC (even with a
discount I couldn't afford one as a stdudent) but had access.

> In that eighties thing we had an IBM mainframe too.
> 2 techs from that club came to work on it if there was a problem.
> Very special kind of people, reminds me of some FBI character fun movie.
>
> All about image selling...
>

Dark blue suits? I sure know those.

>
>>>> You could build your own interface cards. I bought a book "Top-Training
>>>> for Turbo-Pascal" that even came with a Vero/Vector style ISA card.
>>> After I sold the TV shop I went, after several other things,
>>> to work in the late eighties for a company where I just did that,
>>> ISA cards, I invented the wave table soundcard, suggested Boss patented it,
>>> he did not, an other missed opportunity,
>>
>> Had that happen as well. Brainstorm meeting, the whole company. Theme:
>> What else could we do with ultrasound? Only requirement was absolutely
>> no laughing about ideas of others.
>>
>> So I and a few other guys came up with an idea we thought was grandiose:
>> The sonic toothbrush! Thundering laughter, people slapping their knees,
>> falling off chairs. Needless to say, nothing came of this meeting. Five
>> years later Philips started making oodles of money with ... a sonic
>> toothbrush (we have them).
>
> mmm never used one.
> What does it do to the brain?

It buzzes it :-)

> I did some experiments with ultrasound, probably more power.
> Blew up about 10 piezo tweeters in the process.
> Chased away birs and other life forms.
> To be more precise drug addicted youth.
> Sort of worked....
> Older people could not hear it.
> Last week I tested how far I could still hear.
> 15 kHz no problem, above that ...
> Still pretty good I think.
>
>>> Mostly the rest was special I/O stuff, huge amounts of I/O
>>> we only used IBM, no clones,
>>> Then ISA was replaced by what was micro channel bus... sort of flopped.
>>>
>> It had to and I predicted it (to IBM folks). Only open architectures can
>> win in this market.
>
> I think it was their defense against the clones.
>

Predictably, that backfired hugely.

>
>> You can still buy all sorts of new PC with ISA, because of heavy
>> industrial use. They are here to stay.
>
> Yes, do not know of any of that ISA stuff I made is still being used,
> but that sort of PCs would come in handy.

[k...@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz]

Never owned one. I certainly never would have worn one to work.

>>>>> You could build your own interface cards. I bought a book "Top-Training
>>>>> for Turbo-Pascal" that even came with a Vero/Vector style ISA card.
>>>> After I sold the TV shop I went, after several other things,
>>>> to work in the late eighties for a company where I just did that,
>>>> ISA cards, I invented the wave table soundcard, suggested Boss patented it,
>>>> he did not, an other missed opportunity,
>>>
>>> Had that happen as well. Brainstorm meeting, the whole company. Theme:
>>> What else could we do with ultrasound? Only requirement was absolutely
>>> no laughing about ideas of others.
>>>
>>> So I and a few other guys came up with an idea we thought was grandiose:
>>> The sonic toothbrush! Thundering laughter, people slapping their knees,
>>> falling off chairs. Needless to say, nothing came of this meeting. Five
>>> years later Philips started making oodles of money with ... a sonic
>>> toothbrush (we have them).
>>
>> mmm never used one.
>> What does it do to the brain?
>
>
>It buzzes it :-)

...as well as other things. ;-)

>> I did some experiments with ultrasound, probably more power.
>> Blew up about 10 piezo tweeters in the process.
>> Chased away birs and other life forms.
>> To be more precise drug addicted youth.
>> Sort of worked....
>> Older people could not hear it.
>> Last week I tested how far I could still hear.
>> 15 kHz no problem, above that ...
>> Still pretty good I think.
>>
>>>> Mostly the rest was special I/O stuff, huge amounts of I/O
>>>> we only used IBM, no clones,
>>>> Then ISA was replaced by what was micro channel bus... sort of flopped.
>>>>
>>> It had to and I predicted it (to IBM folks). Only open architectures can
>>> win in this market.
>>
>> I think it was their defense against the clones.
>>
>
>Predictably, that backfired hugely.

Except that's where you are wrong. It didn't backfire at all. It was a huge
success in IBM's chosen market - business. It only "failed" when the whole
model of the PC "failed" as a business line. Intel and M$ took all the profit
out of the business so IBM left.

[Joerg]

Because you probably had no or very little direct customer contact. Else
they would have made ya :-)

>>>>>> You could build your own interface cards. I bought a book "Top-Training
>>>>>> for Turbo-Pascal" that even came with a Vero/Vector style ISA card.
>>>>> After I sold the TV shop I went, after several other things,
>>>>> to work in the late eighties for a company where I just did that,
>>>>> ISA cards, I invented the wave table soundcard, suggested Boss patented it,
>>>>> he did not, an other missed opportunity,
>>>> Had that happen as well. Brainstorm meeting, the whole company. Theme:
>>>> What else could we do with ultrasound? Only requirement was absolutely
>>>> no laughing about ideas of others.
>>>>
>>>> So I and a few other guys came up with an idea we thought was grandiose:
>>>> The sonic toothbrush! Thundering laughter, people slapping their knees,
>>>> falling off chairs. Needless to say, nothing came of this meeting. Five
>>>> years later Philips started making oodles of money with ... a sonic
>>>> toothbrush (we have them).
>>> mmm never used one.
>>> What does it do to the brain?
>>
>> It buzzes it :-)
>
> ...as well as other things. ;-)
>

Yeah. Went to Trader Joe's on the way home yesterday and scored, big
time: Kennebunkport Winter Ale (the stuff with lots of volts) went on
sale, from $7.99 down to $2.99 a six-pack. It became mine but I left
four six-packs for others, as a courtesy :-)

>>> I did some experiments with ultrasound, probably more power.
>>> Blew up about 10 piezo tweeters in the process.
>>> Chased away birs and other life forms.
>>> To be more precise drug addicted youth.
>>> Sort of worked....
>>> Older people could not hear it.
>>> Last week I tested how far I could still hear.
>>> 15 kHz no problem, above that ...
>>> Still pretty good I think.
>>>
>>>>> Mostly the rest was special I/O stuff, huge amounts of I/O
>>>>> we only used IBM, no clones,
>>>>> Then ISA was replaced by what was micro channel bus... sort of flopped.
>>>>>
>>>> It had to and I predicted it (to IBM folks). Only open architectures can
>>>> win in this market.
>>> I think it was their defense against the clones.
>>>
>> Predictably, that backfired hugely.
>
> Except that's where you are wrong. It didn't backfire at all. It was a huge
> success in IBM's chosen market - business.

Nope, sure wasn't:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Channel_architecture

That's exactly what I saw in Europe where, as a consultant, I got around
a lot (and also as an employee before that). MircoChannel completely
flopped over there, in the business world.


> ... It only "failed" when the whole

> model of the PC "failed" as a business line. Intel and M$ took all the profit
> out of the business so IBM left.

They screwed it up. I don't know what rode them with that idea of making
stuff proprietary and demand license fees for board architectures. And
then they had one of the best operatings systems ever made for a PC,
OS/2, and what did they do? Let go of the steering wheel ... which
caused it to crash and burn.

Don't get me wrong. IBM is IMHO a great company that stands by its
products and makes things work. Our family has been tied to them
probably longer than yours, and I've used their service later in life.
But they did squander their PC market share.

[k...@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz]

But people continue to believe it was a blue monolith. Some even drank
alcohol.

So?

>That's exactly what I saw in Europe where, as a consultant, I got around
>a lot (and also as an employee before that). MircoChannel completely
>flopped over there, in the business world.

What is exactly what you saw? Were you a F-100 CTO?

> ... It only "failed" when the whole
>> model of the PC "failed" as a business line. Intel and M$ took all the profit
>> out of the business so IBM left.
>
>
>They screwed it up. I don't know what rode them with that idea of making
>stuff proprietary and demand license fees for board architectures. And
>then they had one of the best operatings systems ever made for a PC,
>OS/2, and what did they do? Let go of the steering wheel ... which
>caused it to crash and burn.

No, they weren't after the same market. They knew there was no money in
bottom feeding.

>Don't get me wrong. IBM is IMHO a great company that stands by its
>products and makes things work. Our family has been tied to them
>probably longer than yours, and I've used their service later in life.
>But they did squander their PC market share.

No, they didn't *WANT* your business. If you forced the issue, they'd
grudgingly sell to you, but not on purpose.

[Joerg]

k...@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz wrote:
> On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 11:04:22 -0800, Joerg <inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>
>> k...@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz wrote:
>>> On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 08:02:40 -0800, Joerg <inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Jan Panteltje wrote:
>>>>> On a sunny day (Wed, 07 Mar 2012 12:54:55 -0800) it happened Joerg
>>>>> <inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote in <9rq095...@mid.individual.net>:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Jan Panteltje wrote:
>>>>>>> On a sunny day (Wed, 07 Mar 2012 10:30:13 -0800) it happened Joerg
>>>>>>> <inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote in <9rpnpr...@mid.individual.net>:
>>>>>>>

[...]

>>>>> I did some experiments with ultrasound, probably more power.
>>>>> Blew up about 10 piezo tweeters in the process.
>>>>> Chased away birs and other life forms.
>>>>> To be more precise drug addicted youth.
>>>>> Sort of worked....
>>>>> Older people could not hear it.
>>>>> Last week I tested how far I could still hear.
>>>>> 15 kHz no problem, above that ...
>>>>> Still pretty good I think.
>>>>>
>>>>>>> Mostly the rest was special I/O stuff, huge amounts of I/O
>>>>>>> we only used IBM, no clones,
>>>>>>> Then ISA was replaced by what was micro channel bus... sort of flopped.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>> It had to and I predicted it (to IBM folks). Only open architectures can
>>>>>> win in this market.
>>>>> I think it was their defense against the clones.
>>>>>
>>>> Predictably, that backfired hugely.
>>> Except that's where you are wrong. It didn't backfire at all. It was a huge
>>> success in IBM's chosen market - business.
>>
>> Nope, sure wasn't:
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Channel_architecture
>
> So?
>

It says why it failed in the marketplace.

>> That's exactly what I saw in Europe where, as a consultant, I got around
>> a lot (and also as an employee before that). MircoChannel completely
>> flopped over there, in the business world.
>
> What is exactly what you saw? Were you a F-100 CTO?
>

What I am saying is that there were tons of PCs and they did not have a
micro channel bus. CTOs typically don't know much about that, most
certainly not F-100 company ones. I was an engineer.

>> ... It only "failed" when the whole
>>> model of the PC "failed" as a business line. Intel and M$ took all the profit
>>> out of the business so IBM left.
>>
>> They screwed it up. I don't know what rode them with that idea of making
>> stuff proprietary and demand license fees for board architectures. And
>> then they had one of the best operatings systems ever made for a PC,
>> OS/2, and what did they do? Let go of the steering wheel ... which
>> caused it to crash and burn.
>
> No, they weren't after the same market. They knew there was no money in
> bottom feeding.
>

They thought they knew but were wrong. How do you think Bill Gates
amassed this huge amount of wealth? Hardly by bottom-feeding.

>> Don't get me wrong. IBM is IMHO a great company that stands by its
>> products and makes things work. Our family has been tied to them
>> probably longer than yours, and I've used their service later in life.
>> But they did squander their PC market share.
>
> No, they didn't *WANT* your business. If you forced the issue, they'd
> grudgingly sell to you, but not on purpose.

Yeah, that I never understood. They left a lot of money on the table.

[k...@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz]

Keep up that lie. As long as you start with that proposition you will always
come around to "it failed". The fact is that it DIDN'T. It was quite
successful in the market for which it was designed. Sorry, you aren't that
market. IBM never cared about you.

>>> That's exactly what I saw in Europe where, as a consultant, I got around
>>> a lot (and also as an employee before that). MircoChannel completely
>>> flopped over there, in the business world.
>>
>> What is exactly what you saw? Were you a F-100 CTO?
>>
>
>What I am saying is that there were tons of PCs and they did not have a
>micro channel bus. CTOs typically don't know much about that, most
>certainly not F-100 company ones. I was an engineer.

Irrelevant. There were *LOADS* that did, because there was a value
proposition in MC. Just because that value meant nothing to you (or I),
didn't mean that others didn't value it. It didn't die until PCI took that
position (and was late enough to benefit from cheap gates).

>
>>> ... It only "failed" when the whole
>>>> model of the PC "failed" as a business line. Intel and M$ took all the profit
>>>> out of the business so IBM left.
>>>
>>> They screwed it up. I don't know what rode them with that idea of making
>>> stuff proprietary and demand license fees for board architectures. And
>>> then they had one of the best operatings systems ever made for a PC,
>>> OS/2, and what did they do? Let go of the steering wheel ... which
>>> caused it to crash and burn.
>>
>> No, they weren't after the same market. They knew there was no money in
>> bottom feeding.
>>
>
>They thought they knew but were wrong. How do you think Bill Gates
>amassed this huge amount of wealth? Hardly by bottom-feeding.

No, they were *NOT* wrong. A company the size of IBM can't feed on the bottom.
Its cost structure won't allow it and it can't be nimble enough.

>
>>> Don't get me wrong. IBM is IMHO a great company that stands by its
>>> products and makes things work. Our family has been tied to them
>>> probably longer than yours, and I've used their service later in life.
>>> But they did squander their PC market share.
>>
>> No, they didn't *WANT* your business. If you forced the issue, they'd
>> grudgingly sell to you, but not on purpose.
>
>
>Yeah, that I never understood. They left a lot of money on the table.

On purpose. If you wanted to buy 20,000 identical machines, they'd probably
get interested.

[WoolyBully]

On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 07:59:07 -0800, Joerg <inv...@invalid.invalid>
wrote:

>WoolyBully wrote:
>> On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 06:12:15 -0500, JW <no...@dev.null> wrote:
>>
>>> The industrial market is still going strong with ISA.
>>
>>
>> Industrial computers are not "PC"s
>
>
>ROFL! That was a good one ...

Industrial Computer

Personal Computer

You are contending that they are the same?

You are full of shit. And you're stupid as well.

[Jasen Betts]

On 2012-03-06, WoolyBully <Wooly...@arcticicemasses.org> wrote:
>>>
>> I do not think there was such a thing a s channel 36..been too long -
>>think the tops was channel 13.
>
> It is a typo, dumbfuck.
>
> Your common sense quotient is even lower than anyone else yet this
> week.

As always,
wrong.

[Nico Coesel]

Joerg <inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote:

>WoolyBully wrote:
>> On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 06:12:15 -0500, JW <no...@dev.null> wrote:
>>
>>> The industrial market is still going strong with ISA.
>>
>>
>> Industrial computers are not "PC"s
>
>
>ROFL! That was a good one ...

He is right. Its mostly unstable low cost crap.

IIRC Siemens has some decent industrial gear. HP also makes very
reliable rack mount servers. Both will drain your budget and I doubt
you can get ISA slots.

--
Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply
indicates you are not using the right tools...
nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.)
--------------------------------------------------------------

[WoolyBully]

On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 13:44:48 GMT, ni...@puntnl.niks (Nico Coesel) wrote:

>>ROFL! That was a good one ...
>
>He is right. Its mostly unstable low cost crap.
>
>IIRC Siemens has some decent industrial gear.

If you had to control trains and other critical mission type gear, you
would have nice designs to do it with too. We have such a maker here in
the US, but I will leave you to guess to whom I refer.

> HP also makes very
>reliable rack mount servers. Both will drain your budget and I doubt
>you can get ISA slots.

I don't want an ISA slot, but a 1U HP DL360 is a REAL nice piece of
gear, and you can get one for like $1800. Dual Zeon, up to Ginormous RAM
space (72GB+). Id buy one to replace my current PC in a heartbeat.

Some of the best chassis design and construction I have ever seen.

One torx driver allows complete disassembly/reassembly.
One screw even, for the most part, in fact.

The 2U is even more bad ass.

And, even at 1U, it will take a dual space full ht graphics card.
Cool design.

[Joerg]

Nico Coesel wrote:
> Joerg <inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>
>> WoolyBully wrote:
>>> On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 06:12:15 -0500, JW <no...@dev.null> wrote:
>>>
>>>> The industrial market is still going strong with ISA.
>>>
>>> Industrial computers are not "PC"s
>>
>> ROFL! That was a good one ...
>
> He is right. Its mostly unstable low cost crap.
>
> IIRC Siemens has some decent industrial gear. HP also makes very
> reliable rack mount servers. Both will drain your budget and I doubt
> you can get ISA slots.
>

What I wrote was "industrial market", as in production equipment or
research labs. They use a lot of ISA PCs. Sometimes they are mounted in
19" racks, sometimes regular towers or desktop cases. The mobo quality
isn't all that different from a consumer PC but they feature the more
archaic interface standards such as ISA slots, oodles of RS232
connections, some LPT ports, and so on. This is because a production
manager won't buy a whole new die bonder for half a million Dollars just
because the PC croaked :-)

A lot of stuff simply won't run with an emulated LPT port. If the
computer breaks you want a replacement with the least amount of
differences possible because time is of the essence.

[Joerg]

Then none of the companies I had a clients were the market, and some
were fairly big ones. Which makes me wonder, what was the market for
micro-channel? Are there any solid numbers how many they actually sold?
That's the only thing that would convince me that all the press about
the market failure of the micro channel architecture is wrong :-)

>>>> That's exactly what I saw in Europe where, as a consultant, I got around
>>>> a lot (and also as an employee before that). MircoChannel completely
>>>> flopped over there, in the business world.
>>> What is exactly what you saw? Were you a F-100 CTO?
>>>
>> What I am saying is that there were tons of PCs and they did not have a
>> micro channel bus. CTOs typically don't know much about that, most
>> certainly not F-100 company ones. I was an engineer.
>
> Irrelevant. There were *LOADS* that did, because there was a value
> proposition in MC. Just because that value meant nothing to you (or I),
> didn't mean that others didn't value it. It didn't die until PCI took that
> position (and was late enough to benefit from cheap gates).

So how come that you cannot buy PCs with micro channel anymore (at least
I haven't seen any) but you can, for example, buy PCs with ISA bus
connectors at almost every street corner?

What for did one absolutely need a PC with a micro channel bus?

>>>> ... It only "failed" when the whole
>>>>> model of the PC "failed" as a business line. Intel and M$ took all the profit
>>>>> out of the business so IBM left.
>>>> They screwed it up. I don't know what rode them with that idea of making
>>>> stuff proprietary and demand license fees for board architectures. And
>>>> then they had one of the best operatings systems ever made for a PC,
>>>> OS/2, and what did they do? Let go of the steering wheel ... which
>>>> caused it to crash and burn.
>>> No, they weren't after the same market. They knew there was no money in
>>> bottom feeding.
>>>
>> They thought they knew but were wrong. How do you think Bill Gates
>> amassed this huge amount of wealth? Hardly by bottom-feeding.
>
> No, they were *NOT* wrong. A company the size of IBM can't feed on the bottom.
> Its cost structure won't allow it and it can't be nimble enough.

I know. That was always an issue big blue had. Like a big oil tanker,
change of direction could take forever, or just didn't happen.

The let me ask you another question: Their big brass should have know
what you wrote. So why did they even start developing their own OS/2?

>>>> Don't get me wrong. IBM is IMHO a great company that stands by its
>>>> products and makes things work. Our family has been tied to them
>>>> probably longer than yours, and I've used their service later in life.
>>>> But they did squander their PC market share.
>>> No, they didn't *WANT* your business. If you forced the issue, they'd
>>> grudgingly sell to you, but not on purpose.
>>
>> Yeah, that I never understood. They left a lot of money on the table.
>
> On purpose. If you wanted to buy 20,000 identical machines, they'd probably
> get interested.

Except that's not how business is done anymore, except maybe at the
state level where money is not so important because it's taxpayer money
and that's "free". Companies start a project or production with a few
PCs. Then it grows and it's dozens of PC. Then it grows some more and ...

If you don't take care of a client from day one, someone else will.

[JW]

On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 06:17:12 -0800 WoolyBully

<Wooly...@arcticicemasses.org> wrote in Message id:

<hp3kl7tmg176cq3vd...@4ax.com>:

>Dual Zeon

Doh!

[Michael A. Terrell]

Nico Coesel wrote:
>
> Joerg <inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>
> >WoolyBully wrote:
> >> On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 06:12:15 -0500, JW <no...@dev.null> wrote:
> >>
> >>> The industrial market is still going strong with ISA.
> >>
> >>
> >> Industrial computers are not "PC"s
> >
> >
> >ROFL! That was a good one ...
>
> He is right. Its mostly unstable low cost crap.
>
> IIRC Siemens has some decent industrial gear. HP also makes very
> reliable rack mount servers. Both will drain your budget and I doubt
> you can get ISA slots.

I just had a 'Dell PowerVault 725N Storage Server' delivered. It
cost me $52.29. The build quality blows away their consumer PC line.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/310383268237


--
You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense.

[Joerg]

Their consumer and small biz gear is already pretty good to begin with.
I've never had anything from Dell fail other than one hard drive. It's
been over a decade now that I buy stuff from them.

Servers are great. If we need even better quality my clients sometimes
design their own, custom enclosure and all. I just EMC'd one for a
client and was impressed. Quiet like a church mouse.

[FatBytestard]

On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 08:01:24 -0800, Joerg <inv...@invalid.invalid>
wrote:

>Nico Coesel wrote:
>> Joerg <inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>>
>>> WoolyBully wrote:
>>>> On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 06:12:15 -0500, JW <no...@dev.null> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> The industrial market is still going strong with ISA.
>>>>
>>>> Industrial computers are not "PC"s
>>>
>>> ROFL! That was a good one ...
>>
>> He is right. Its mostly unstable low cost crap.
>>
>> IIRC Siemens has some decent industrial gear. HP also makes very
>> reliable rack mount servers. Both will drain your budget and I doubt
>> you can get ISA slots.
>>
>
>What I wrote was "industrial market",

Good for you, idiot. What you should have written was "industrial
market still tied to legacy control hardware".

Us modern industrial folks use modern hardware, and modern PCs and
modern hardware control layers.

Automated, pneumatically controlled test fixtures is a good example in
this realm, because they are always being made.

> as in production equipment or
>research labs.

You are a child, and even though you "saw" some such gear, you were
simply 'in attendance', because you learned NOTHING.

> They use a lot of ISA PCs.

No shit. So do we. So do a lot of folks. We ALSO have migrated to
more modern controls.

> Sometimes they are mounted in
>19" racks,

Wow. You really have a vast wealth of experience based intelligence
there. HAhahahaha! NOT!

What a joke. Like you needed to declare such a given.

"Folks in industry use racks."

Nothing more needs to be said, idiot.

> sometimes regular towers or desktop cases.

Have you ever looked at something you wrote BEFORE you send it, to see
how stupid it sounds being read?

> The mobo quality
>isn't all that different from a consumer PC

More stupidity. They are at least three years behind the consumer
market typically. If you buy a "PC" from "Industrial Computer Source"
for example, you will get items that were designed that long ago. Their
manufacturing cycles are a lot longer, and they get deals buying up "old"
"new stock".

> but they feature the more
>archaic interface standards such as ISA slots,

Only those which are custom to the maker. Like SuperMicro, for
instance. COTS parts are more new gear, and less if not NONE of the
legacy stuff.

> oodles of RS232
>connections,

Whether you believe it or not, these problems were resolved as well.

> some LPT ports, and so on. This is because a production
>manager won't buy a whole new die bonder for half a million Dollars just
>because the PC croaked :-)

A good IT guy would already have a spare motherboard around, ready to
go. If that was you, you failed at that as well.

>
>A lot of stuff simply won't run with an emulated LPT port.

A FEW things will not. Sucurity dongles, and few other things.

Ever heard of "NET USE", dumbass? I have many softwares which ONLY
look for HARD hardware ports, and I fool them all the time into firing
off to LPT1, but it goes to our laser printer upstairs.

> If the
>computer breaks you want a replacement with the least amount of
>differences possible because time is of the essence.

The die bonder PC broke because the retarded twits who were supposed to
maintain it had no clue at that time, and very likely still have no clue.
It probably broke because it was full of crud and never experienced even
a single maintenance event in its life.

[WoolyBully]

It was morning. Changes nothing, and anybody knows what I meant.

At least I am not one of you retarded fucks like you who intentionally
munge MS' names.

You just got Xwned.

[josephkk]

Let's be more accurate here, switching from open architecture to vendor
lock in is a bad strategy.

>
>>> to this day it is heavily used in industrial
>>> applications and you can buy new PCs with numerous ISA slots.
>>
>> Where you have armies of specialists who can figure out crap like
>> address and IRQ conflicts.
>>
>
>Au contraire. It's so bone-simple that lots of production equipment runs
>forever on ISA. The cards hardly ever croak and if one does you just
>replace it.
>

Absolutely. It has gone so far that there are new (often free)
specialized versions of DOS to run the old industrial automation
applications on new hardware.

>
>>> When the
>>> ICT on one of my projects croaked (after humming along for almost 15
>>> years ...) the client simply bought a new ISA-PC and it was humming
>>> again. Except now they have a CD-writer in there which makes backup easier.
>>
>>
>>>> ... As we saw with advent of PCI, later, they were right. ...
>>>
>>> PCI isn't used so much in automation. Sometimes, yes, but a lot is still
>>> ISA.
>>
>> Irrelevant.
>>
>
>Not to the industry.
>
>
>>> http://www.nixsys.com/products/accessories/motherboards/nx853.html
>>>
>>>
>>>> ... The greater market wasn't ready for the
>>>> integration of microchannel, though.
>>>>
>>> AFAIR they kept it proprietary. That was the cardinal mistake.
>>
>> That's wrong. But thanks for playing.
>>

Not exactly true. While they did "open it up" it was a case of too little
too late and obligated others to pay high prices for the chips or spend
megabucks on engineering alternatives for a minority technology at the
time.

[josephkk]

On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 08:12:33 -0800, Joerg <inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote:

>
>>> They thought they knew but were wrong. How do you think Bill Gates
>>> amassed this huge amount of wealth? Hardly by bottom-feeding.
>>
>> No, they were *NOT* wrong. A company the size of IBM can't feed on the bottom.
>> Its cost structure won't allow it and it can't be nimble enough.
>

I disagree. There were plenty of large ($100B+) companies that were
successfully bottom feeding. IBM just had too much "not invented here" to
learn from them.

[Jasen Betts]

On 2012-03-10, FatBytestard <PhatBy...@somewheronyourharddrive.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 08:01:24 -0800, Joerg <inv...@invalid.invalid>
>>

>>A lot of stuff simply won't run with an emulated LPT port.
>
> A FEW things will not. Sucurity dongles, and few other things.

eg: bitbang programers.

> Ever heard of "NET USE", dumbass? I have many softwares which ONLY
> look for HARD hardware ports, and I fool them all the time into firing
> off to LPT1, but it goes to our laser printer upstairs.

LPT1 is not a hardware port, it's just a name, has been since forever.

--
⚂⚃ 100% natural

[Martin Brown]

On 09/03/2012 16:12, Joerg wrote:
> k...@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz wrote:
>> On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 13:52:48 -0800, Joerg<inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>>
>>> k...@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz wrote:
>>>> On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 11:04:22 -0800, Joerg<inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> k...@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz wrote:
>>>>>> On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 08:02:40 -0800, Joerg<inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Jan Panteltje wrote:

>>>>>>>> I think it was their defense against the clones.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Predictably, that backfired hugely.
>>>>>> Except that's where you are wrong. It didn't backfire at all. It was a huge
>>>>>> success in IBM's chosen market - business.

Only if you count quickly giving away market share to their competitors
as a major success. Compaq and Dell could not believe their luck!

>>>>> Nope, sure wasn't:
>>>>>
>>>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Channel_architecture
>>>> So?
>>>>
>>> It says why it failed in the marketplace.
>>
>> Keep up that lie. As long as you start with that proposition you will always
>> come around to "it failed". The fact is that it DIDN'T. It was quite
>> successful in the market for which it was designed. Sorry, you aren't that
>> market. IBM never cared about you.
>
> Then none of the companies I had a clients were the market, and some
> were fairly big ones. Which makes me wonder, what was the market for
> micro-channel? Are there any solid numbers how many they actually sold?
> That's the only thing that would convince me that all the press about
> the market failure of the micro channel architecture is wrong :-)

The integrated all you really need in an office market was catered for
but they had no idea that people were using them in fairly large numbers
for scientific instrument control and automated testing with
sophisticated custom I/O cards installed.

>>>>> That's exactly what I saw in Europe where, as a consultant, I got around
>>>>> a lot (and also as an employee before that). MircoChannel completely
>>>>> flopped over there, in the business world.
>>>> What is exactly what you saw? Were you a F-100 CTO?
>>>>
>>> What I am saying is that there were tons of PCs and they did not have a
>>> micro channel bus. CTOs typically don't know much about that, most
>>> certainly not F-100 company ones. I was an engineer.
>>
>> Irrelevant. There were *LOADS* that did, because there was a value
>> proposition in MC. Just because that value meant nothing to you (or I),
>> didn't mean that others didn't value it. It didn't die until PCI took that
>> position (and was late enough to benefit from cheap gates).

It took a long time to die off completely but it was a marketting
disaster of monumental proportions and major corporates in Europe looked
at it and called Compaq or Dell within the week. ISTR it took me about 3
days after the launch party to reallise all the pitfalls and traps in
store if we re-engineered everything for IBM MCA lock-in.

>
> So how come that you cannot buy PCs with micro channel anymore (at least
> I haven't seen any) but you can, for example, buy PCs with ISA bus
> connectors at almost every street corner?

The MCA bus was so successful that it is *very* hard to find any decent
soundcards for it at all. I can't recall if they ever managed a workable
IEEE488 - I think NI did eventually but by then it was already too late.

>
> What for did one absolutely need a PC with a micro channel bus?

Nothing and that was the point. The PS/2 was great if you wanted a
fairly trouble free box on a secretary's desk. No more daft addin cards
to provide clocks or adequate memory.

>>>>> ... It only "failed" when the whole
>>>>>> model of the PC "failed" as a business line. Intel and M$ took all the profit
>>>>>> out of the business so IBM left.
>>>>> They screwed it up. I don't know what rode them with that idea of making
>>>>> stuff proprietary and demand license fees for board architectures. And
>>>>> then they had one of the best operatings systems ever made for a PC,
>>>>> OS/2, and what did they do? Let go of the steering wheel ... which
>>>>> caused it to crash and burn.

>>>> No, they weren't after the same market. They knew there was no money in
>>>> bottom feeding.
>>>>
>>> They thought they knew but were wrong. How do you think Bill Gates
>>> amassed this huge amount of wealth? Hardly by bottom-feeding.
>>
>> No, they were *NOT* wrong. A company the size of IBM can't feed on the bottom.
>> Its cost structure won't allow it and it can't be nimble enough.

OS/2 was allowed to crash and burn because IBM suits insisted on
backwards compatibility with the AT 286 CPU and their marketing men did
not want such a potent machine robbing sales off their S/3x range.

> I know. That was always an issue big blue had. Like a big oil tanker,
> change of direction could take forever, or just didn't happen.
>
> The let me ask you another question: Their big brass should have know
> what you wrote. So why did they even start developing their own OS/2?

It was a joint effort with Microsoft and they did a damn good job. The
product at least by v2.10 was extremely robust and reliable but
arguments with Microsoft over backwards compatibility soured relations.

MS had sufficient resource by this stage to support parallel development
of fully 386 Windows3 and the rest as they say is history.

>>>>> Don't get me wrong. IBM is IMHO a great company that stands by its
>>>>> products and makes things work. Our family has been tied to them
>>>>> probably longer than yours, and I've used their service later in life.
>>>>> But they did squander their PC market share.
>>>> No, they didn't *WANT* your business. If you forced the issue, they'd
>>>> grudgingly sell to you, but not on purpose.
>>>
>>> Yeah, that I never understood. They left a lot of money on the table.
>>
>> On purpose. If you wanted to buy 20,000 identical machines, they'd probably
>> get interested.
>
>
> Except that's not how business is done anymore, except maybe at the
> state level where money is not so important because it's taxpayer money
> and that's "free". Companies start a project or production with a few
> PCs. Then it grows and it's dozens of PC. Then it grows some more and ...
>
> If you don't take care of a client from day one, someone else will.

In this case Compaq, Dell and Intel who laughed all the way to the bank!

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

[Joerg]

Martin Brown wrote:
> On 09/03/2012 16:12, Joerg wrote:
>> k...@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz wrote:
>>> On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 13:52:48 -0800, Joerg<inv...@invalid.invalid>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> k...@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz wrote:
>>>>> On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 11:04:22 -0800, Joerg<inv...@invalid.invalid>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> k...@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz wrote:
>>>>>>> On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 08:02:40 -0800,
>>>>>>> Joerg<inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Jan Panteltje wrote:
>
>>>>>>>>> I think it was their defense against the clones.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Predictably, that backfired hugely.
>>>>>>> Except that's where you are wrong. It didn't backfire at all.
>>>>>>> It was a huge
>>>>>>> success in IBM's chosen market - business.
>
> Only if you count quickly giving away market share to their competitors
> as a major success. Compaq and Dell could not believe their luck!
>

Bingo!

[...]

>>>>>> That's exactly what I saw in Europe where, as a consultant, I got
>>>>>> around
>>>>>> a lot (and also as an employee before that). MircoChannel completely
>>>>>> flopped over there, in the business world.
>>>>> What is exactly what you saw? Were you a F-100 CTO?
>>>>>
>>>> What I am saying is that there were tons of PCs and they did not have a
>>>> micro channel bus. CTOs typically don't know much about that, most
>>>> certainly not F-100 company ones. I was an engineer.
>>>
>>> Irrelevant. There were *LOADS* that did, because there was a value
>>> proposition in MC. Just because that value meant nothing to you (or I),
>>> didn't mean that others didn't value it. It didn't die until PCI
>>> took that
>>> position (and was late enough to benefit from cheap gates).
>
> It took a long time to die off completely but it was a marketting
> disaster of monumental proportions and major corporates in Europe looked
> at it and called Compaq or Dell within the week. ISTR it took me about 3
> days after the launch party to reallise all the pitfalls and traps in
> store if we re-engineered everything for IBM MCA lock-in.

You were not the only one :-)

>>
>> So how come that you cannot buy PCs with micro channel anymore (at least
>> I haven't seen any) but you can, for example, buy PCs with ISA bus
>> connectors at almost every street corner?
>
> The MCA bus was so successful that it is *very* hard to find any decent
> soundcards for it at all. I can't recall if they ever managed a workable
> IEEE488 - I think NI did eventually but by then it was already too late.
>>
>> What for did one absolutely need a PC with a micro channel bus?
>
> Nothing and that was the point. The PS/2 was great if you wanted a
> fairly trouble free box on a secretary's desk. No more daft addin cards
> to provide clocks or adequate memory.
>

They had all these great products. A large chunk of the PCs are for the
office market and they could have offered "carefree SW-HW packages" for
that. They had the PS/2, they had OS/2 which might have been the best OS
ever for the PC (as in "does not crash") ... and then they just threw it
all away.

[...]

>> I know. That was always an issue big blue had. Like a big oil tanker,
>> change of direction could take forever, or just didn't happen.
>>
>> The let me ask you another question: Their big brass should have know
>> what you wrote. So why did they even start developing their own OS/2?
>
> It was a joint effort with Microsoft and they did a damn good job. The
> product at least by v2.10 was extremely robust and reliable but
> arguments with Microsoft over backwards compatibility soured relations.
>
> MS had sufficient resource by this stage to support parallel development
> of fully 386 Windows3 and the rest as they say is history.
>

So had IBM. To me this looked more like lack of vision way up in the
management chain.

>>>>>> Don't get me wrong. IBM is IMHO a great company that stands by its
>>>>>> products and makes things work. Our family has been tied to them
>>>>>> probably longer than yours, and I've used their service later in
>>>>>> life.
>>>>>> But they did squander their PC market share.
>>>>> No, they didn't *WANT* your business. If you forced the issue, they'd
>>>>> grudgingly sell to you, but not on purpose.
>>>>
>>>> Yeah, that I never understood. They left a lot of money on the table.
>>>
>>> On purpose. If you wanted to buy 20,000 identical machines, they'd
>>> probably
>>> get interested.
>>
>>
>> Except that's not how business is done anymore, except maybe at the
>> state level where money is not so important because it's taxpayer money
>> and that's "free". Companies start a project or production with a few
>> PCs. Then it grows and it's dozens of PC. Then it grows some more and ...
>>
>> If you don't take care of a client from day one, someone else will.
>
> In this case Compaq, Dell and Intel who laughed all the way to the bank!
>

And, for a while, Gateway. Also HP.

[Michael A. Terrell]

Joerg wrote:

>
> Michael A. Terrell wrote:
> >
> > I just had a 'Dell PowerVault 725N Storage Server' delivered. It
> > cost me $52.29. The build quality blows away their consumer PC line.
> >
> > http://www.ebay.com/itm/310383268237
>
> Their consumer and small biz gear is already pretty good to begin with.
> I've never had anything from Dell fail other than one hard drive. It's
> been over a decade now that I buy stuff from them.
>
> Servers are great. If we need even better quality my clients sometimes
> design their own, custom enclosure and all. I just EMC'd one for a
> client and was impressed. Quiet like a church mouse.

There are literally tons of excellent servers being replaced as data
centers are upgraded. Most look brand new, but don't support multi
Terabyte hard drives. This model will take up to four 250 GB drives,
has two ethernet ports and has a 250W power supply. It is designed for
RAID as well. One rack unit high, and weighs 27 pounds.

It is classed as a 'back office server' for small to medium sized
businesses. The Server 2000 was deleted, but I got that on Ebay for
$26. It will also run other operating systems.

[josephkk]

I suspect that conflict of vision is the correct case. Older established
income streams did understand that the PC was a threat to them, but failed
to understand that their doom was already inevitable.