Doing some cleaning.  Ran across some crossover serial and parallel cables i used to use to image machines back in the old days. 

So much has changed

I hesitated on ditching them.  But realistically, my retro days have long since passed. Just taking space.

A lot of my stuff is now like that.  "do i really need this 3rd backup item? " normally no. Its not like i cant buy another if some bizarre thing would happen.  I'm not a kid trying to figure out how to pay rent and eat at the same time.  And with things like amazon, you can get it tomorow and not in 2 weeks via mail order, if a local store didnt have it. or something that 'would be good enough", so 'time" isnt an excuse either.

Sun Oct 01 2023 13:45:03 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

Yeah ... most of my serial stuff was left behind at the office when I changed jobs 22 years ago ... they kind of needed it. I still have a Wyse dumb terminal.
I need an Altair to go with it.

https://www.nutsvolts.com/magazine/article/build-a-pocket-sized-altair-computer

Sun Oct 01 2023 13:45:03 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

I need an Altair to go with it.

some only ever used terminals with them.  I believe a later model, had no front end switches. 

Tue Oct 03 2023 11:41:51 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

Why would anyone want an Altair clone that does not have das blinkenlichten?
If you're gonna go retro, go retro with the cool parts.

My first home built was a 8080. It had slide switches for entering code.   Pain in the ass.  Still needed lights so i new it did something.

Eventually i scored a bit of core memory via my mother. So that problem was solved. Later i got this fancy thing called a keyboard..    Eventually a used terminal from a ham swap-fest ( then had to write the stuff to make it do something )

ah, fun days.

Somewhere someone is/was doing a full repro of the Altair front end, and sold plastic front panels so it looked 'real'.  tho i think he used emulation on a RPI in the back end, hooked the switches/lights to GPIO pins, to simplify things.

Wed Oct 04 2023 09:28:59 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

Altair was the first S-100 bus computer. Most people only used the switches to get a boot loader going, and maybe if you were a real guru you might have used the switches and blinkenlichten as a debugging tool.

Sure, by the time S-100 landed in my world, the machines already had a boot loader at 0x0000 that went to the first 8" floppy disk and fetched a copy of CP/M. But the machine only had one light on it. Sad.

But if you're going to recreate the magic of a vintage computer from nearly half a century ago, you've got to go with das blinkenlichten. To do otherwise is sacrilege.

FreeDOS saved my ass at a previous job

We had some controllers form Japan that ONLY ran via a MSDOS PC due to custom software written just for the device it hooked to. Even trying to run it from windows as a 'dos' program failed miserably.   And by that point you were not buying it from Microsoft. Reverse engineering the software to recreate it was not practical.

Had a couple of machines die one summer and replaced them.. Thankfully FreeDOS was around and we didnt have to shut the place down. Sent them some $ even.

Cleaning the garage a little this weekend, and ran across a unopened box of 8mm data tapes and a radio shack 'phone recorder switch' where you would plug your analog phone in, and if you flip the switch it would also route the voice to a tape recorder.  Ah. memories.  And a 5.25 20mb ( or 10mb... cant remember now without looking it up ) seagate hard drive, should be out of a PS/2 Model 80 tower i had for a while, if i remember right.

I think ill toss my vacuum pump.  Not done automotive AC work in decades.

Not sure if it still works at this point ( im sure the battery is toast, regardless ) but my TV coax cable tester/signal meter/etc was up on that shelf too.  One place i worked, early 90s, we used coax to distribute both TV and network, at the same time.  in the plant. Basically it was the same as future coax modems sharing TV from your local cable company... but cards in the PC instead of a box.  I actually thought of hooking up an apartment building with them once, and getting us an ISDN line in from local dialup internet place, but they were too costly to make it worthwhile for people. Motorola things. Piss poor physical design as they had nothing holding the connector down but a bit of solder...  was forever putting them back on. Ended up getting a bunch of free ones when we wen tto twisted pair, ( token ring.. yay ) but they were all ps/2 cards, so unusable except to a few. 

Reminds me of the industrial ps/2 box i had.. i wonder where that went. i know its gone, since perhaps 95.. but I dont ever remember getting rid of it..   oh well.

I think i changed my mind. Those vacuum pumps can run over 1k..  i better keep it.  

This actually came out of an industrial level balloon machine decades ago. ( long story - dad sold 'stuff' and this was damaged beyond repair during a move between customers, but the pump was still good, and almost new ).  i kept it around for use for other vacuum needs. Sure its way overkill, but it was free...

And i donno about eBay, too many stories of people getting ripped off trying to sell ( well and buy, but at least you can get a refund pretty easy ).   Was thinking of selling my NVIDIA jetson boards that way too, but backed out due to that.

moca is still a very good option for older homes that have rg6 especially when you're not in the mood to drag additional cables.  i put it in and easily get 2.5gb in every room.  outside service is still limited to your contract (500mbps +) only $65 for each room. i have decent wifi, but i also hate wifi.

Wed Nov 15 2023 09:28:46 AM EST from IGnatius T Foobar

...

I threw out a bunch of coaxial cable and fittings etc. this week too. I was moving a bit of existing ethernet into a smurf tube that I'd installed last year when I had the ceiling open. There was also a run of RG6 that hadn't been used in years, and I just pulled it out and threw it away. I think in-home coaxial cable is done at this point, even if you have pay tv it's going to come in over a data connection. Set top boxes are wifi now. I don't think we'll ever need RG6 again.

MoCA is pretty cool because it runs over existing 75Ω coaxial cable, and it isn't sensitive to the wiring topology.  You can run it through splitters, you can daisy chain it, you can do all sorts of good stuff.  It does have a fairly low limit of how many nodes can be on the network, and it is of course a collision domain.

I would have loved to see PCIe MoCA cards that could go directly into a computer without an outboard conversion to Ethernet in between.    In fact, I'll bet if they had made MoCA adapters cheaper and more plentiful, they would have become a major force in home networking, in the same way Novell made LANs ubiquitous in the early 1990s by flooding the market with cheap Ethernet cards.

Alas, the game has been played at this point, and the majority of homes are using some combination of Ethernet and WiFi.  MoCA remains a really cool solution for homes that have coaxial cable in place and it would be difficult to rewire.  On the pay television front, however, the use of coaxial cable appears to be on the way out.  The current generation of boxes have both coaxial and ethernet (and wifi) and the pay tv providers are gradually moving channels from DOCSIS to IPTV.  The use of an entire 6 MHz band for just a couple of channels just isn't a good use of bandwidth anymore.

In a few years you'll start seeing homes full of abandoned coaxial cable and wifi set top boxes.

Different protocol i assume, but that was in effect what we had at the plant that i was talking about earlier, somewhere around here. ( early 90s ). Was coax direct to the card, and then back to the 'backbone' which also carried the in-plant TV system. It was 'just another network card' to the PC.  ( mostly were PS/2 running OS2 at the time, later win3.x ) Unsure how many you could bridge off one port back at the 'hub' in the data center.  We had it fan out across the plant so it was spread ot. My guess is no more than 20 devices per port was what we had, with some being TVs, some ' user computers' some 'dedicated print servers', and of course some 'plant computers' ( out in NEMA style steel cabinets sitting beside the actual lines ) . We also had 'bus lines' which were basically huge diameter versions, with large amps. they would feed the outlying buildings and far corners of the main plant. ( ~1.5 million square feet for the main building ).

When we went to token ring, it was point to point cat5 ( at least i think it was 5.. either way it was twisted pair. might have pre-dated 5, i honestly dont remember, and i didnt run the line anyway as plant electricians did it ). The 'switch' in the datacenter 'faked' the ring so losing one, didnt mean you lose the entire thing.. It was temporary until everything was moved to windows .. then later when they swapped out the ring modules for Ethernet, it was already 'ready'. 

( before the PCs, it was serial terminals, and i think, via the same coax infrastructure but that was before i got there. I do know the previous place i was at, were still mostly using terminals, via coax. And yes, now i feel even older. )

Sat Nov 25 2023 17:18:43 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

I would have loved to see PCIe MoCA cards that could go directly into a computer without an outboard conversion to Ethernet in between.   

Context does not matter much, but it was discussing forth on a C64. "I am unable to find all the files, but if anyone has the original floppies, i can digitize them"

LoL, i think he has the wrong hobby..