Friday, April 9, 2021
Tuesday, February 9, 2021
The AWS HDC-board Enigmatic Bipolar PROMs: Signetics 82S191
Our working folder for reverse-engineering the operation of these HDC Boards
Using the Signetics N82S191
Also used is the Fairchild 93Z511
Tom Trebisky's Disassembly of these EPROMs on Github
https://github.com/trebisky/AWS
Tool used: https://github.com/brouhaha/s8x30x
and
http://cholla.mmto.org/computers/8x300/
All HDC PROM dumps can be downloaded by clicking here.
Monday, February 1, 2021
BRINGING IT TOGETHER by Bert Latamore CONVERGENT TECHOLOGIES, Inc.
On one of our Convergent Technologies AWS Turbo machines, we successfully dumped the hard drive, and found this text, which seemed to be of some significance to the company. I repost it here for posterity and historical preservation. Note that the letter has some typos (auto-correct is flagging the errors for me as I create this post!). I have decided to keep all of them included, uncorrected, to preserve the originality of the text as we found it on the hard drive.
This letter appears to be a draft of a public notification or announcement, and therefore, it seems appropriate to publish it here, publicly visible, likely 40+ years after it was written.
The machine does not appear to be used by Convergent Technologies directly, but rather by a customer, so the presence of this letter is something of an enigma. Enjoy!
---------------------------------------------------------------
UNAME
BRINGING IT TOGETHER
by Bert Latamore
CONVERGENT TECHOLOGIES, Inc.
Implements New Design Concepts
Designers have been trying since the mid-40's to consolidate in a single computer the boradest range of data processing capabilities. Only recently, with the advent of very inexpensive, small electronic parts (or microprocessors) have these attempts begun to become reality in the form of the standalone, desktop computer. Until now, however, even these units were characterized by the disadvantages of slow speed data handling and limited data storage capacity.
Now a fairly new firm, CONVERGENT TECHOLOGIES, Inc., Santa Clara, CA., is challenging the minicomputer market with a new approach that distributes the computer power among many work stations while connecting all units through an electronic network system that makes them into a single machine. The result -- a system that grows with the owner's needs from the size of single minicomputer to that of a minicomputer network. And the system's cost is less than equivalent machines from competitive companies
The secret to
CONVERGENT TECHNOLOGIES' machine is not a new technology. Rather, as the firm's name suggests, it is the more effective and innovative combination of existing technologies, all of which are available in other machines but which have not previously been combined.
The computer is housed in modular units which can be combined in several ways to create each desktop work station. The visual display module, for instance, features a 15-inch, high-resolution, green-tinted screen that you can be tilted up and down and rotated up to 60 degrees from far left to far right. The display can be split into any number of windows, each of which can have its own cursor, to accommodate an entire document or several different data displays at the same time. Displays can be scrolled up and down or left and right. Multiple displays can be scrolled independently of each other. Single characters or groups of characters can be made to stand out in several ways including underlining, reverse video to give dark on light, intensifying and blinking.
The system has been designed to be friendly and flexible, allowing each user to configure it as needed. Because of this flexibility, basic tasks are accomplished wherever possible by using easily modified programs instead of unchangeable hardware.
The keyboard is physically seperate from the rest of the computer to allow different users to adjust the distances between eye, keyboard, and screen for individual comfort. The keyboard design puts keys in clusters of logical groups, including a standard typewritter character board, a 14-key numeric pad, and eight-key status contrtol pad, a six-key cursor control pad, and a 10-key function group that is user definable. Because all key functions are defined by program instructions rather than being built into the hardware, the entire key encoding arrangement can be altered easily by the user to customize his keyboard.
Each displayable character is built in a 10-by-15 pixel cell. The standard character set contains 256 characters. Unlike almost all computers, which store their character sets in Read Only Memory, Convergent's character set is stored in a high-speed memory on the video board. The character set may be easily changed under program control by loading another set from a disk file. This way the number of characters that may be used in the same application program is virtually limitless.
The machine has a 16-bit processor and can hold up to one million characters of information in its usable memory, giving it capabilities closer to those of a large minicomputer than to most desktop microcomputers.
Permanaent disk memory expansion units are also available
Even the basic computer -- the black box that does the processing --has been redesigned to meet human needs. Instead of the standard box-shaped configuration, it is located behind a tilted board that stands to the right of the display screen and looks like a lectern. It's built-in copy clips hold documents being entered into the machine in the same visual plane as the video display, so as to eliminate constant refocusing and thus reduce eye fatigue.
@I @
Courier 72
9.12
---------------------------------------------------------------
This letter was found on AWS Turbo model 200/266, Serial # A-17618 on a Computer Memories CM5616 hard drive (6 heads, 256 cylinders)
Wednesday, January 13, 2021
Disk identifiers in BTOS/CTOS
This valuable information was left as a posted comment on our Contact page by user Madcat on January 13, 2021:
Hi, You may have figured this out already but I heard your comment about Disk identifiers in BTOS/CTOS so thought I'd add my two-penny worth of memories.
The OS supports multiple physical disk drives, these are addressed linearly along the X-bus, so the first hard disk encountered is D0, the second is D1... likewise the first floppy is F0, the second F1... When a Disk is intialised it is also assigned a name, and if I remember correctly the boot disk is always called 'Sys' (I think earlier iterations called it 'Win' and I can't remember if this was then retained as an alias but hey-ho! :-)) so, the upshot of this is that you can address a disk either by its position on the bus or the name you give it when it's IVolumed so if your boot disk is the first disk on the bus then you can refer to it in any command as either [d0] or [Sys] (and possibly [Win]).
If you have a cluster workstation with a local file system then if you wished to refer to disks at the master you prefix the drive/name with an exclamation mark so [!D0] or [!Sys] would refer to the first disk at the master or the boot disk at the master respectively (they needn't be the same but were usually). The OS is also transparent to this so you can use this nomenclature even at the Master workstation thus referring to [!D0]myrunfile.run in a command run there just points to the Master workstation d0 disk at any location in the cluster.
Hope that rather sketchy explanation helps - might help you with the boot emulation issue you were referring to. The file system has some other nice addressing quirks too but I won't bore you with them.
Sunday, January 10, 2021
Our first Successful CTOS Installation on an AWS Turbo!
To see the hardware pictures/details of the machine we are using in the above videos (Serial # A-27077), please click here.
Monday, January 4, 2021
Sunday, January 3, 2021
Solving the mystery of the [NGEN hard disk type code]
First of all, the very phrasing of this title doesn't feel quite right, because we're working on a Convergent AWS Turbo, which should be a predecessor to the NGEN. But as it seems, we have no access as of yet to pre-NGEN install disks/programs, so these, which seem to be made for the NGEN, are also AWS backwards-compatible, or so it seems. At least with the disk we are using right now:
10.2 STANDARD SOFTWARE AWS INITIALIZATION Disk 1 of 1
And, in the menu for hard drive initialization, we see this very important option, that is named exactly that. Not AWS hard disk type code, but NGEN hard disk type code.
[insert screen picture]
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