PHP 2700 – Texas Instruments Program Recorder

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My adventures with the Texas Instruments Program Recorder.

On September 4, I found a beautiful Texas Instruments Program Recorder on eBay and bought it from MAKBONE2012.  It was delivered on September 13 and the packaging was really well done.   I bought this one because the seller said it was tested and working.  I bought a new set of Duracell ‘C’ batteries, put them in along with a tape.  The simplest test I could think of was pushing the fast forward button, nothing.  I tried the rewind button and again nothing.

I contacted the seller and told them what happened, the response was very quick along the lines of; that’s weird, I’ll issue a refund.  I got the whole refund right away.  I asked what I should do with the recorder, toss it, was the reply.

I go back to eBay and find another one, which was also said to be tested and working.  I order on September 22, and it arrives very quickly in good shape.  I try my simple test with the new Duracell batteries.  Fast forward, click, nothing.  Rewind, click nothing.  Rats.

I go out and buy another set of ‘C’ batteries, this time Energizer.  Same test, same results.  I try them in the first recorder which I haven’t tossed yet and get the same results.

It seems unlikely that two tape machines that were tested and working before I got them would not work.  I’m looking them over, no visual signs of damage.  I do notice something I had not paid attention to.  On both machines, they had six buttons for controls, but they also had a slide switch on top.  One setting was Play/Record and the other was Pause.  Both were set to Pause.  I moved the switch to Play/Record and tested it.  The machine quietly starts to fast forward, I push stop and try a rewind, resulting in it quietly rewinding.

I grab the other set of batteries and put them in the first player, move that switch and away it goes.

Now for the hard part.  I had this first player from MAKBONE2012, that works.  I can’t keep it and the money, so I contact him through eBay, let him know what a dummy I am and issue a refund back to him.

Now I have two program recorders and in my searches, I found several people selling cables for using two recorders with the TI.  I ordered one, which came in right away and am now set up to use them both.

TI 99/4a: Cables and Tapes

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At the end of August, I ordered a pack of cassettes and a cable for the tape player.  The cables and tapes came in the first week of September, looking good.

I pulled out my tape player and set up my TI.  When I got ready to hook up the tape player, I found the tape player I had does not have the correct speaker jack.

Rather than trying to find an adapter that may work, I will go online and find a TI Tape player designed for the TI 99/4A.

 

Terminal Emulation, Apple //c & Mac SE

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In August, I decided to use my Apple //c and my Macintosh SE as terminals on my emulated PDP 11(Puff).  I wanted them to work as video terminals.

In the past, when accessing Puff, I would use a telnet program on one of my pc’s.  I went with a pretty vanilla kind of setup.  I configured all terminals as LA36, and all the telnet programs I used worked.

When setting up this latest generation of Puff, I configured it so it would use com1: and com2: as vt100 terminals.

Com1: is set up at 1200,8n1 and that is where my //c is connected using a null modem cable.  Com2:, meanwhile is setup at 9600, 8n1 and is connected with a null modem cable to my Macintosh SE.  Instead of using telnet software I use a communications program on both machines to connect to Puff.

This is very much like using a dialup connection, so the first program I tried on the //c was ZLink.  I got it to work by matching the 1200, 8n1 parameters.  Using the Open Apple T command to change emulation to VT100.  The only program I knew of that worked differently on a display terminal was VT50PY, so I ran that.  It worked as I remembered, displaying a running a systat.

For software on the Mac side, I ran Mac Terminal, again VT50PY runs well on it.

At the high school we had two VT52 terminals and later received two more display terminals that were, I believe, VT100 compatible.  I don’t remember much about them, except they were amber screened and made with a crisp metal edged case.

Inspired, partly by David Moisan’s 2012 Retrochallange project Hac-Man, I was thinking I would recreate an old game or two.  I wanted to work on a game that used the VT100 ‘s cursor control abilities.  In high school I worked on a game I called GALAXY which was loosely based on the star trek games of that time.  It was written to be played on a display terminal only, as it required the ability to use cursor control to keep a grid on the screen and update it during play.

I did some research and found several sites with VT100 codes, but was missing the key to how to use them.  Johnny Billquist and Dennis Boone from comp.os.rsts came back with the key answer to cursor control.  Printing an escape character with the high bit set chr$(27+128) followed by the open square bracket, the row, a semicolon, the column (fixed column from colon, 18-sep-16) and the letter H positions the cursor.

PRINT CHR$(155);”[“;NUM1$(ROW%);”;”;NUM1$(COL%);”H”;

The semicolon at the end is important as it keeps the cursor there.

I wrote a simple program to position the cursor at each corner of the screen and print something.  It didn’t work on either the //c or the Mac.

David Moisan said said in his blog (https://davidcmoisan.wordpress.com/2012/07/05/hac-man-retrochallenge/) he used tera term, an open source windows program, in VT100 emulation and it worked.  I ran my copy and used telnet to connect to Puff.  When I ran my test program, it worked as I wanted it to.

That being the case, maybe the programs I was running on the //c and Mac weren’t as VT100 compatible as needed.  I tried ZLink on the Mac SE and when I connected, ran my test program and it worked.  On the Apple //c, I found ProTerm worked with my test program.  VT50PY would not run properly under either ProTerm on the //c or ZLink on the Mac, which made sense since it was written for the VT50 series of terminals.

UPDATE:  After testing both ProTerm and ZLink on the Apple //c, I found neither handles the graphics characters well.  Zlink just displays regular characters and ProTerm does not do corners or intersections with line drawing. (02-SEP-16)

 

TI 99/4A and Video Cable

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My second computer was a TI 99/4a that I bought new at a J. C. Penny for about $100 in the fall of 1983.

I had put it in storage, but could not seem to find it until about three weeks ago.  I was looking for a printer and found the TI instead.  Quite excited, I brought it home.  It turns out, I did not store two important cords with it; the video cord to hook it up to a display and the audio cord to save or load programs and data with a cassette player.

I quickly looked online for a source for these cables.  I found a video cable at 8 bit Classics (https://www.8bitclassics.com/) for a reasonable price and ordered it.  When it came in right away, I tried it out and the TI seems to work fine.  I wanted to make sure the TI worked, before I ordered the audio cable.

Since that proved to be true, I looked on eBay and found one for right around $10 with shipping.  Another $10 and a pack of c90 cassette tapes is on the way (also found on eBay).

So now the TI will have to wait another week or so, for the tapes and cable to come in.

 

Emulating the PDP 11

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Years ago, I stumbled across an article about emulating the PDP 11 computer.  After doing a little more research I found a package of programs called SimH, which allowed you to emulate a number of computers.  Amongst these was an emulator program for the PDP 11 system.

RSTS/E stands for Resource Sharing, Time Sharing, Extended and systems that ran it quite often had dial up connections.  Our high school had several.  The emulators I have found let you set up dial up connections using telnet.

I set up a simulation of the PDP 11/70 that I used in high school.  I could not find a version of RSTS/E that was close to V06 that I used in high school so I installed one of the later version of RSTS/E, 9.2, I believe, and patched it with the y2K patch to fix dates.  I ran that for years to play with occasionally.

I later found a version that was much closer, V7.0.07.  This I installed and patched with a Y2K patch.  Again I ran this version for years.

Since 2003 or 2004, I’ve been running these simulations, and one thing has been missing, the ability to print seamlessly, just like a real 11/70.

In this time, I have looked at another emulator, Ersatz 11, from time to time.  It is a commercial emulator for businesses who need to retain their software, but replace their hardware.  They allow hobbyist use for smaller configurations, and that works for me.

Last fall, I bought a Rosewill PCI communications card for my PC.  It has two serial ports and one parallel port.  I bought it to replace a usb serial adapter that I used to move files back and forth between my PC and either my Apple //c or my Macintosh SE.

Recently, I was reading through the documentation of Ersatz and realized, that printing was something it does.  I decided to try it out.  I started setting it up and added a little something extra.

I set it up to assign both serial ports as terminals.  My apple //c is set up as KB1: and my Mac SE as KB2: using terminal emulation software on both machines.  I also setup to assign lp0: to the windows printer using OSPRINT:.

Last Update: 15-Aug-17 Fixed spelling error and added a comma.

Exposure to the PDP 11

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I started high school in the fall of 1976 at South Portland High School.

We had a PDP 11/70 running RSTS/E Vo6B on 256KW of memory with two RP04 hard drives.

My first year in high school, my algebra class assigned us to write basic programs, solving certain quadratic equations.  This was my first real exposure to computers.  Over the course of high school, I spent a great many hours working on that computer.

During the Summer after both my Junior and Senior years I worked for the school as a programmer/operator.  I handled the daily and weekly system backups as well as maintained systems programs with updates.  From a programming point of view I worked on data entry and analysis programs for the high school, school department and the police department.

RSTS/E V06 was written in assembler, however most of the commonly used system programs were written in Basic-Plus.  I believe it was in my Junior year, we got a version of Pascal from OMSI.  The computer also had COBOL for the business classes.

I wrote mostly in Basic-Plus, although I did take a class in Pascal and wrote some in that.  I wrote one small program in Cobol to read cards from the card reader and put them in a data file.

 

 

 

Timex Sinclair 1000

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In 1982, when they first came out, I was given a Timex Sinclair 1000 as a Christmas Gift.  A few years later it was in the trunk of my car when it was stolen.

Off and on over the last few years, I’ve thought it would be fun to have another one.  Prices on ebay, run around $50  plus shipping, which is more than I wanted to spend.  A couple of weeks ago, I found one in my local Good Will for $4.

When I got it home and opened up the box, it contained the Timex Sinclair, a power pack, an AV cable and a set up two cables for hooking up a cassette player for loading and saving programs/data.  It was in the original box, with the original Styrofoam, unfortunately no manual.

I  plugged the power pack into the Sinclair and into the outlet.  After connecting the AV cable to my TV, I was unable to make it work.  There is a channel switch on the Sinclair for 2 or 3, so I tried both channels on my TV, with no luck.

After sleeping on it I remembered that there was supposed to be another box between the Sinclair and the TV, a switch box.

I had one from my Apple //c, so I tried it and it worked.

The next day I went back to Good Will and found a cassette player for $3, so that I could load and save programs.  I checked to make sure the player would play a cassette, but haven’t tried it with the Sinclair yet.

 

 

Macintosh Network

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My Macintosh Plus had the original 1MB of RAM when I got it.

I worked for a printer/publisher back in the eighties.  I did some word processing and database work, as well as some desktop publishing on a similar Macintosh.  Back then, the original prices for this equipment was very high.  A Macintosh Plus with just the internal 800K diskette drive, would have gone for around $2600 dollars, which would be just around $5500 in today’s money.

You could get and use an ImageWriter or ImageWriter II dot matrix printer for use on the Macintosh, but the print quality would not be the best.  When the LaserWriter printer came out, you could get what was then astounding quality, at 300 DPI.  The big problem with that was the very high list price of just under $7000 in 1985, adjusted to 2015, roughly around $15,500.  Apple had addressed this by building networking abilities into the Macintosh, so several people could share this expensive hardware.

When I got my Macintosh SE, it had an internal hard drive, which I wanted to be able to share with my Macintosh Plus.  I only had an ImageWriter II printer which I use with my Apple II’s, but I wanted to share it with my Macintosh computers.  That meant I had to look into networking the Macintosh computers.

For months, I looked on the internet for details on networking the Macintosh computers.  I was able to find very little.

I did find some notes that said in order to share files or hard drives, you needed System 7 or higher.  System 7 wants more than 1MB RAM, which is why I wanted to upgrade to 4MB.

I still didn’t have all the information or hardware to network my Macintosh computers, but did have enough information to look into upgrading the memory in one or both as noted in earlier posts.

Last Update: 30-Aug-15

 

Mac Memory Upgrade

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I still wanted to fix my Macintosh, but didn’t know how.  It sat on the back burner of my mind, but one day I stumbled across an article that said the Sad Mac error 0F0003, although defined as an instruction error, sometimes meant there was a problem with the memory.

I looked on ebay and found a matched set of 4-1MB simms.  I bought them fairly cheaply (read that under $20) and several days later they came in.

I opened the case, pulled out the old memory and replaced it with the new set of matched simms and closed up the case.  When I booted up the Macintosh it worked.  I left it running overnight, using it occasionally and had no problems with it.

Last Update: 28-Aug-15

 

Mac Memory Upgrade Attempt

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During the course of the last year I attempted to upgrade the memory in my Macs.  I have no electronics background or training, so I was learning as I went.

Starting off with a little research.  The upgrade can be similar for both models; open the case, switch the simms and cut a resistor.  Later models of the SE had a jumper you could change instead of cutting the resistor.  All the notes I ran across, said to cut only one leg of the resistor and move it to make a gap.  That way, if you want to return it to a 1MB system all you have to do is resolder the leg and put the old simms back.

I bought four 1MB simms on ebay and a long torx bit.

My Mac SE has a Prodigy SE upgrade by SuperMac.  The upgrade has a 68020 and 2MB of ram.  I opened up the SE and looked at the Prodigy board and the memory was soldered to the board as far as I could tell.  I closed it up and moved on to the Mac Plus.

I switched the memory, cut the resistor and put it all back together.  When I started it up, all seemed fine for a few minutes, then I got a Sad Mac error 0F0003.  Looking on the internet I found this code broken down  into 0F Exception (or software error), 0003 Illegal Instruction, which didn’t make any sense to me.  The Mac Plus worked fine before changing the memory, but the software kept crashing afterword.

The memory upgrade was a failure. I started looking for a replacement Mac Plus and found a working one that did not have a keyboard or mouse.  This worked out for me with a non working Mac, that I could borrow the keyboard and mouse from.

Last Update: 27-Aug-15