Tuesday, April 1, 2025

The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

Everyone should pull one great practical joke in their lifetimes. This one was mine, and I think it's past the statute of limitations. The story is true. Only the names are redacted to protect the guilty.

My first job out of college was a database programmer, even though my undergraduate degree had nothing to do with computers and my current profession still mostly doesn't. The reason was that the University I worked for couldn't afford competitive wages, but they did offer various fringe benefits, and they were willing to train someone who at least had decent working knowledge. I, as a newly minted graduate of the august University of California system, had decent working knowledge at least of BSD/386 and SunOS, but more importantly also had the glowing recommendation of my predecessor who was being promoted into a new position. I was hired, which was their first mistake.

Saturday, March 15, 2025

More pro for the DEC Professional 380 (featuring PRO/VENIX)

In computing the DEC PDP-11 is something of a geologic feature. Plus, as most systems in the family were minicomputers, they had the whole monolith thing going for them too (minus murderous apes and sucking astronauts into hyperspace). Its fame is even more notable given that Digital Equipment Corporation was among the last major computer companies to introduce a 16-bit mini architecture, beaten by the IBM 1130 (1965), HP 2116A (1966), TI-960 (1969) and Data General Nova (1969) — itself a renegade offshoot of the "PDP-X" project which DEC president Ken Olsen didn't support and even cancelled in 1968 — leaving DEC to bring up the rear with the PDP-11/20 in 1970.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that DEC, admittedly like many fellow mini makers, was similarly retrograde when it officially entered the personal computer market in 1982. At least on paper the DEC Rainbow was reasonable enough: CP/M was still a thing and MS-DOS was just newly a thing, so Digital put an 8088 and a Z80 inside so it could run both. On the other hand, the DECmate II, ostensibly part of the venerable PDP-8 family, was mostly treated as a word processor and office machine; its operating system was somewhat crippled and various bugs hampered compatibility with earlier software. You could put a Z80 or an 8086 in it and run CP/M and MS-DOS (more or less), but it wasn't a PC, and its practical utility as a micro-PDP didn't fully match the promise.

However, what DEC did to the PDP-11 was odder still. The 1982 DEC Professional 350 had the same F-11 ("Fonz") CPU as the bigger PDP-11/23, though that's where the similarity ends, as it implemented a new bus with completely different option cards and an incompatible interrupt system making it all but impossible to run unmodified PDP-11 programs. It had really nice graphics for 1982, but instead of the usual choices its intended system software was the laughably named Professional Operating System, or P/OS — execrated for its sluggish menus and limited feature set, of which people were only too quick to make the obvious joke. You could get CPU option cards like the DECmate II's to also make it into a weak PC or a weak CP/M machine, but they ran through P/OS too, and they weren't cheap. At the same time, however, in order to be the most inexpensive PDP-11 system ever, the low-binned DEC Professional 325 didn't even have a hard disk.

All of these systems were originally meant as commodity machines for office work, yet more or less with the exception of the Rainbow, they couldn't run much that office professionals actually wanted to run and little that existing PDP users did. Still, despite questionable technical choices, these machines (the Pros in particular) are some of the most well-built computers of the era. Indeed, they must have sold in some quantity to justify the Pro getting another shot as a high end system. Here's the apex of the line, the 1984 DEC Professional 380.

The Pro 380 upgraded to the beefier J-11 ("Jaws") CPU from the PDP-11/73, running two to three times faster than the 325 and 350. It had faster RAM and came with more of it, and boasted quicker graphics with double the vertical resolution built right into the logic board. The 380 still has its faults, notably being two-thirds the speed of the 11/73 and having no cache, plus all of the 325/350's incompatibilities. Taken on its merits, though, it's a tank of a machine, a reasonably powerful workstation, and the most practical PDP-adjacent thing you can actually slap on a (large) desk.

This particular unit is one of the few artifacts I have left from a massive DEC haul almost twelve years ago. It runs PRO/VENIX, the only official DEC Unix option for the Pros, but in its less common final release (we'll talk about versions of Venix). I don't trust the clanky ST-506 hard drive anymore, so today we'll convert it to solid state and double its base RAM to make it even more professional, and then play around in VENIX some for a taste of old-school classic Unix — after, of course, some history.

Saturday, January 18, 2025

The "35-cent" Commodore 64 softmodem

Rockwell famously used 6502-based cores in modems for many years, but that doesn't mean other 6502s couldn't be used. If only there were a way to connect a Commodore 64's audio output directly to an RJ-11 plug ...
Of the many interesting posts from Usenet's more golden days, one of my favourites was John Iannetta's "35-cent modem," where the SID chip provides one-way data modulation to a receiving modem connected via the C64's sound output. While I remember him posting it back in 1998, I never actually tried it at the time.

Wouldn't you know it, but it came to mind the other day when I was looking at a recent haul of Convergent WorkSlate stuff I've got to catalogue. Officially the WorkSlate's only means of telecommunications is its 300 baud internal modem. While we have a 9600bps way of wiring up a Workslate to a modern computer, it's always nice to have a simpler alternative, and I figured this would be a great challenge to see if John's old program could let my Commodore SX-64 talk to my WorkSlate. Spoiler alert: it works!

Saturday, January 4, 2025

Refurb weekend: Atari Stacy

Ask any Atari Stacy owner how to open an Atari Stacy and the answer is always "never, if you can avoid it." So I'll just lead with this spoiler image after the refurb to prove this particular escapade didn't completely end in tragedy:
Stacys are horrible machines to work on. Nobody likes being inside of one. The daughterboards don't have keyed connectors (including the power supply!) and are constantly attempting to come free, the display "cable" is actually a Medusa's wig of wires that like to short (!), the top case is a huge bulky sheet of increasingly fragile plastic that somehow has to fit around the floppy drive yet down on the keyboard simultaneously, and the entire laptop is an uneasy sandwich held together by a small set of screws in plastic races that strip and fracture with little provocation. So why do we tolerate this very bad, bad, bad, bad girl? Because most of us will never see the much lighter and streamlined STBook in the flesh, let alone own one. If you really want a portable all-in-one Atari ST system, the Stacy is likely the best you're gonna do.

And we're going to make it worse, because this is the lowest-binned Stacy with the base 1MB of memory. I want to put the full 4MB the hardware supports in it to expand its operating system choices. It turns out that's much harder to do than I ever expected, making repairing its bad left mouse button while we're in there almost incidental — let's just say the process eventually involved cutting sheet metal. I'm not entirely happy with the end result but it's got 4MB, it's back together and it boots. Grit your teeth while we do a post-mortem on this really rough Refurb Weekend.