One Polish YT retrocomputing (MERA400) channel backed up some custom formatted HDD not long ago. He backed stuff up on the magnetic transition level and then decoded FM from that into an image file - just to be sure he doesn't destroy any data by a similar mishap. In his case the data being backed up was completely unique and if something went wrong it would be lost to history.
That will be a hell of a project for the students! Dont put yourself down for this, it`s a lot better than nothing that what they have and gave them a chance to learn more about serial comms! Congrats on the job of keeping the centurions alive!
Now the Tech School students need to 3D print a set of custom Centurion front panel switch caps for the OPSYS, Select & R/F buttons. A custom set of machined metal switch caps would be great also.
Surely rather than Xmodem, you should consider Kermit. A Centurion port would look lovely on the already massive list of systems it works on, including several of the Centurion's competitors, and the protocol is simple and robust. (And it was always the pits to have to type the filename twice, as Xmodem made you do...)
Agreed. I immediately checked to see if Centurion were on the Kermit implementation list and was very surprised to see it wasn't - that list has some *very* obscure systems. The biggest advantage of Kermit is it's ability to work over non-transparent links but you do need a fairly good implementation of it (eg c-kermit) to beat Y,Zmodem speeds if the link is transparent.
I always found Kermit way too overengineered and bloatware than just a simple ZModem protocol which was my favourite in the '80s on 8 bit computers. Of course for mainframes and minicomputers then it was right, especially when it came with the operating system.
Z-Modem allows multiple files and embeds the filenames into the transfer stream. X-Modem is simpler, but will end up being a pain if you need to xfer multiple files :)
And communication is one way, unless a block fails a CRC check IIRC. That said I transmitted files straight and never had an issue. We had only hardware flow control going to the PC. Going to the Centurion we had to use character echo since there wasn't any hardware flow control coming from the Centurion and the mux boards only had one byte buffers.
David, I would like to make a hardware Hawk emulator for you, I have embedded development experience. I mostly need documentation for studying the feasibility of it.
Hey! Greeting from Pittsburgh! I never knew of that shop. I will certainly check it out when I'm in that neck of the woods! Keep up the good work. Saving all this old tech makes you a legend in my mind.
I'll be curious to see if you can get hardware flow control signals from the mux board. We never were able to and when our hardware guys asked Centurion the answer was no. But maybe they weren't asking the question the right way. We could get the mux boards/Centurion to respond to flow control sending out, just like it works with the printer. If the mux boards can provide hardware flow control for incoming data, I'm going to be a bit upset, that would have made things much better. Also with a serial, wired connection we never had any issues just transferring the data without XModem or other protocols. So you could choose to keep it simple.
At 8:43 the message from the OS says "ELCOME". :) The Hellorld! wiki says your channel is for "retorocomputing". With a working assembler for the Centurion it would be worth spending time to port some other development tools over to the machine. You could work your way up to a basic C compiler. That would make it much easier to port other tools and programs to the Centurion. BTW, in the Hellorld! program it has a JSR which was stated as being a relative call. In assemblers for other (8-bit) computers JSR takes an absolute address. BSR was used for subroutine calls using a relative address.
If Trace50 was bad on the Cable, surely that means 98% of it was working, not 99% 😀 Great video as always, Every time I see those terms in Action, I just want to break out an old computer emulator and get my Hacker fix in! Did you or your viewers ever see such a terminal that had a blue shade phosphor? Amber or Blue are my favs!
Per 98 vs. 99: I had the same thought, then recalled how to make something to government specification -- measure three times with a micrometer, mark with a piece of chalk, then cut with a chainsaw. 😆 I think I would prefer amber to blue, but it depends on the shade of blue (something like a cyan or sky blue might be okay...) If you use Linux, there is an open-source terminal emulator called minicom that is easily configurable and can save multiple configurations. I find it very useful in communicating with my CP/M single board computer (an SC126).
For getting files on and off a disc emulator would the thing. I know you hinted at something being worked on. The hawk and Phoenix drives are fragile, not something you want to let students mess around with regularly. An interface to an sd card would allow them to work on it with risking the unobtainable parts.
Only if he also installs something like, say, a REALLY LOUD FAN on the disk emulator board, to fully emulate the Hawk Drive experience. ;-) (FWIW, I know of at least two projects that make drive noises for Apple II floppy disks and, IIRC, MFM hard disks. I prefer the quiet, although the drive noises are still nostalgic in a way, hehe.)
@@derekchristenson5711 like IBM putting solenoids in their first keyboards to slap against the outer shell so typist got the loud feedback they were used to from typewriters.
I know you were joking, but I say Genius is a reasonable description :D Dude designed and built a custom vacuum tube computer. And a custom mechanical relay computer.
That's THE type of advertisements I wanna watch on TH-cam! This, or Chris Hadfield inviting to his Masterclass where he's talking about space exploration. Sorry to hear about your failures, but I really hope you'll get it going again! To think that one failing conductor can bork the filesystem... Well, shit happens. Butler Tech surely seems like a nice school to learn actual stuff! Mechanics, electronics, IT, you name it, you get it. I'd even argue it may be better than my alma mater :)
I've done last month an fpga configuration memory loader using a 8051 and xmodem to transfer the data from pc, this protocol is so easy to implement. I think that it will take less than a couple of hours to make xmodem checksum and the disk image transfer work from scratch.
aww jeez! so close!! but.... being able to serially transfer a disc image would be really interesting to see (since it doesnt exist for that platform, yet).
Back in the day we transferred everything through serial interface. Simple, straightforward and worked, but I never got into the detail programming. Would be interesting now to see the nitty gritty if and how one of the vintage programs others have mentioned here could be ported over.
For transferring files to the centurion, a proper communication protocol is of course the nice way. But if the OS is working and the centurion does have any program that lets you type in literal bytes into a file, it might be possible to write a program that does all the steps (logging in, starting that editor, keying in the bytes and saving the file) from your laptop over a plain terminal connection. That would be slow of course, but might be easier to implement than something on the centurion itself. Just a crazy idea. :)
@@BrianMoore-uk6js I think there at Butler Tech the learning is in the problem solving when things dont work as much as using a (effectively obsolete) system only correctly at the software level.
I’m surprised that you didn’t immediately harvest the removable platter heads from the CPU5 Hawk Drive and install them into the CPU6 Hawk to restore complete functionality to that drive.
Have you considered using something like a GoTek to emulate a floppy drive and reverse engineering the FDC boards you have access to in order to talk to the GoTek?
3:13 - Just noticed in this marketing photo that they cut a hole in the top of the desk to place the terminal inside of. It might look more sleek, but that would be incredibly impractical for so many reasons. It's a good thing they didn't go ahead with that design, at least not for Butler Tech's system.
The early "All-in-One" desk models did have the wood top cutout to match the ADDS terminal shipping at that time. In later production of the "All-in-One" we stopped inserting the ADDS terminal into the desktop because of the cost of cutting and trimming the hole plus the cost of the metal tray below the top for the terminal to sit on.
Damn. Adult Education in Ohio is on some different shit lol. Up here in Vancouver, our we had some similar shop classes for computers and whatnot. But they were mostly playing around with breadboards and programming in C. Its interesting stuff, but damn. Imagine having a Centurion to work on. Just an old computer in general would be cool.
Good job it wasn't Tulsa then! I agree, driving in the UK is too much like swimming round inside a fish bowl. The furthest I took my truck was from London to Aberdeen and back (abt 20 hrs driving over 3 days IIRC).
@@ymirthefrostgiant For me it is the hours it takes to go from Clapham to Watford by car , of course if you dont have luggage one can attempt the Southern rail service when it deigns to run. For going beyond Watford one can make goodish progress depending on time of day/night.
@@highpath4776 Mmmm. I live in Essex and a good friend who doesn't drive lives at Fordingbridge in the New Forest. We're planning a trip to Bruges next year, via Dover, so he will have to catch a train from Salisbury either to Weybridge, where I will collect him after driving round the M25 in peak traffic, or he goes all the way into London and out again to Ashford, where I can pick him up on my way to Dover. Neither route is anywhere near ideal for both of us! Even just Essex to Watford needs very careful timing, so I feel your pain!
@@ymirthefrostgiant Greater Anglia did run a Chelmsford to Basingstoke via North London line which was nearly useful but ran at erractic times. The sussex coastway train might be suitable. My inadvertant journey was driving Dunkirk to Normandy - I didnt realise the bridge in Rouen was so high not that effectively I drove Dover to Plymouth though French roads were faster. I should have booked Portsmouth Cherbourg but i wanted to see Dunkirk, which due to time I didnt , in either Direction
Another sure way of destroying data is to plug the connector the wrong way around... Usually those ribbon cables have all odd pins as ground and all even pins as signals. Or the other way around. When you reverse the plug you will connect all signals to ground, and due to signals usually being inverted that will assert the signals that erase or write the entire track...
@@highpath4776 There are different ways. For card-edge connectors there often is a "key" slot (which also serves to prevent swapping connectors), for pin connectors like this one, when there is a full connector on the board there is a slot that aligns with a ridge on the connector. But when the board only contains the pin header, the connector can be reversed without problem. And also misaligned by one or more pins, which often leads to similar trouble.
The ribbon pin cables we built at Centurion did have "Keys" in the early days. We stopped "Keying" the ribbon cables after a short time, because having the cable flipped only caused the system not to boot, no damage to any hardware or data. The rule of thumb at Centurion was the ribbon cable trace wire (or pin one) always was down or to the right. Some of the Warrex Centurion ribbon cable types used did have all the even ( or odd ) pins grounded but not in all cases. In some areas of the system that had 20, 26, 50 & 60 pin ribbon cable that used more then 50% of the pins for signal and less than 50% of the pins for ground.
Could you get something like a GoTek to work? Something that can interface with a modern storage medium (say a Flash drive) to store data which can be read by the Centurion via compatible mounted disk image 🙂
Can you manually edit the sector? It isn't that many bytes for a bodged-together internet to serial bridge so you could use the terminal remotely, read your data from your system and transmit to the desk system. Just need to get someone over there with a remotely accessible PC, the right serial cable, and term software.
Yes we could reformat the couple of damage sectors that have the [ 10B0 Format Error ] but the issue is we do not know data needs to be in the newly reformatted sectors to complete the repair of the disk file system.
Is the greyhound your bro's? They have great, gentle temperaments. My sis had a 'rescue' (retired from racing) one, and she (the greyhound) was a really genteel Lady with a capital L. Luckily, she never knew that she'd been stuck with a male name - racing greyhounds here are named after both their parents for bloodstock reasons, so her name was Jamie Crowned. You involving the high school is an incredibly generous, far-sighted and courageous thing. To be applauded, so I will. 🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌👌✌🐰
Back in college the frat had a dog we think was half greyhound and half German shepherd. The body and color resembled greyhound and head shepherd. That meant the dog was fast and crazy. Could keep up running along side cars and was a true tire-biter: cars and bicycles. Back then nobody bothered with such things as leashes.
@@KameraShy Sis' greyhound was just fast - and I mean faaaaast! More into rabbits than tires though (sorry Usagi!). Good job she trusted sis so much that we could let her off the leash and trust her to be good. Except to rabbits.
I had one of those printers (TI 810). It's an absolutely solid unit. Used it for years, then gave it away when I moved. The only downside is that it's a dot matrix (so noisy) and uses tractor feed paper. I now have an HP LaserJet 5, which I got for free and rebuilt myself, but I still miss my TI 810. Re: serial loading of data. Ethernet is a serial protocol :-) What your Centurion needs is a 10BASE-T Ethernet card. How hard could it be? :-)
Adding a Ethernet interface in the Centurion system was looked at around 1985. Because Ethernet networking was very new in 1985 and not being used by our CPA customer base the time to design a Ethernet card, driver and networking protocol was not part of the Centurion business model.
@@kenromaine2387 I'm sure it made sense at the time :-) However, it would probably be easily doable today, and good design experience building the hardware, interfacing it to the Centurion and writing the driver for the OS.
So… I'm restoring an ACT Apricot computer, here in the UK, and people keep pointing me towards "Kermit" for serial data transfer. What might you know about that? It seems it was developed at Columbia University about 25 years ago and adapted to many systems.
heard of it , but thought it was a bit older than that. Have you looked at some f the UK Personal Computer World mags they had a bit on the Apricot and I sort of (badly) ran a 4 system network of them - problem was the company was not quite sure what the business model was they wanted to use the computers for and the commercial software was a bit too expensive compared to the system they were using (which was a computer posting bureau basically for accounts and payroll only)
So... As far as I know Kermit is one of many protocols to transfer files over a serial link (of the likes of Xmodem/Xmodem-1K, Ymodem and Zmodem), and that it should behave more or less like Zmodem, you initiate the transfer on one side, and on the receiving side you tell the terminal program to expect to receive files using Kermit. That's all I got atm, I've mostly used XModem-1K (which is the same as Xmodem just with bigger data packets) and Zmodem..
Kermit is a software with which you can connect to a Computer via serial and can also comfortably transfer files. It has been ported to many systems. The drawback is that the file transfer built into Kermit is safety-oriented and is much slower than other methods like the *modem family. If the amount of data is low enough and /or you have high speed serial it still could be worth it for ease of use.
Even installing those big heavy rack-drawer units below waste level still scares me. One slight misalignment turns drawer runners and rails into razor blades with barbed ends, ready for the next unsuspecting person to use as a lift handle. Then they want to pull the whole rack over on top of you. The big desk thing is the right idea when it's balanced and heavy duty enough. I never want that stuff above waste level unless it's all on heavy duty carts, never ever above 3 1/2 feet. The gear I work on only tops out @ 90 lbs, slightly smaller but the finger danger is just as bad.
I installed Hawk drives in Warrex-Centurion systems on the manufacturing floor at Centurion and in the customers office by myself for 10 years with zero cut or pinched fingers. Could you hurt yourself by installing or replacing the Hawk into the CDC Hawk rail system, yes if you are not careful.
I stopped at 12:04. I am terrified continuing to watch. 😂 I guess I will just keep existing in a state of hyperposition where that system might still be alive.
Every time I hear about that system at Butler HS I wonder why anybody would keep a unique antique like that in service at a school when it could easily be functionally replaced by a Raspberry Pi hooked up to a keyboard. Surely it's better for the kids to have field experience on a modern Linux SBC than an operating system and hardware that will never run in production again?
Surely it's not either-or? A RasPi will be basically nothing in the school's budget. If they want to have that as an option, it is one. But you'd also be surprised how many mainframes and minicomputers from the 70s are still around - and when their hardware isn't, their drive images and original COBOL software still are! Tons of IT workers specialise in COBOL on old hardware and emulated old software.
Starting to understand what it was like being a field tech back then? I had so many spare (spare[spare]) parts in the back of my car I probably should have had more insurance on it.
Someone in another comment suggested he "just swap" some heads on the spot. That is something a field tech might not be able to do in an hour or two, but not an enthusiast who does it as a hobby.
Talk about nail-biter. With no removable medium on the Centurion desk system, you get one shot for xmodem to work correctly. Xmodem is what we used to use to reflash routers, but the boot ROM had xmodem built into the ROM, so if something hung or the battery on your WFWG 3.11 laptop went dead you could try again.
An alternative that is well within the community's capability is to upgrade the backplane to a boot rom that supports the diagnostic card (unless they did that already, I forget), and then create a custom card that simply contains a full platter only version of the xmodem program, that boots like the diag card does. Given how thoroughly the diagnostic card was reversed engineered, I'm pretty sure creating such a card would be rather simple.
@@jwhite5008 I have jumped around a break in a Hawk 50 pin I/O cable in a pinch before. Scrape of the damaged wire area two dabs of solder and a inch of mod wire as a temp fix.
So, I had another thought: In addition to a nice serial file transfer utility (Kermit, perhaps?), what about a program that lets you edit the raw data on the Hawk drive? I've seen them for various computers over the years, sometimes for use on the system itself, sometimes for use on a different system (so the drive isn't, well, being used for anything at that moment). I've only had to do it for a couple of my CP/M kit computers, and that was just to set up a modern-ish drive for use in CP/M (and both of those used tools on a third computer to edit the drive), but I seem to recall there being programs for the Apple II that let you just play God with raw disk sectors and such. Could one of your brilliant Discord members, who has already programmed something for the Centurion (perhaps whoever is working on the Xmodem program?), whip up a sector editor that would let you literally reach into the disk, find the "hole... blown in the file system", and patch it by hand? Perhaps by overwriting it with E5 or whatever value the Centurion's OS uses for empty, formatted sectors, for instance? 🤔
My question is with all the problems these hard drives have had. Is there anyway to make new platters, or wire up a more modern hard drive into these old machines?
I think he has enough platters, no non-crashed heads. Grafting a head might be possible but unreasonable amount of work. The card and OS seem to require exact tech of hawk/finch i.e. bit clock rate. You could emulate a HDD to a card, emulate the card itself, or write an OS driver to a new card. Cards themselves are old - I'd try making a new card. But I agree that it needs doing - hawks may fail.
@@jwhite5008 Having a non CDC Hawk drive work on the Centurion is a problem because the Centurion DSKI/DSKII disk controller and Centurion's odd sector format of 400 bytes of 16 sectors per track and two tracks per cylinder is totally non-standard with today's disk drives & controllers. Not having the source code for the Centurion OPSYS limits changes to the OPSYS disk I/O software drivers needed to add a new disk I/O system into the OPSYS. Not having to keep 40 year old Hawk drives with very limited parts running is part of the fun.
All this because of a cable failure! Ouch. If I may suggest it, on the return trip you may want to bring more than one string for your bow. Bring a floppy drive, an FFC, and the disks to use that method. Keep them packed and try your X/Y/Zmodem solution first. If that fails, break out the actual hardware and have at it. Nothing succeeds quite like success. Late Edit: Can't remember if that accursed cable got repaired or replaced. If the connectors are IDC type, it's simple enough to remove the connector at the faulty end, move it back to where the wire is intact, and re-attach.
Too bad we can't just slap a usb port into that thing... I kinda wonder if maybe something like a Go-Tech could be made to work as a substitute floppy drive?
@@highpath4776 The directory would need to be updated when the new file is created. So, erase the old directory info, write the new directory and, uh oh...
or emulate them entirely. It should not be too hard to reimplement most of the floppy interface in FPGA + microcontroller, in fact you might get away with just a microcontroller. I can't imagine the protocol is too complex on these systems.
OK, so Moore's Law is declining, but Murphey's Law still seems to be working perfectly... Compliments to all involved in the Good News part! 🙂 Commiserations for the success of the Bad News part. 😞 Let us thank whoever is responsible for the Ugly News part finding the bit bucket! 😐 Loved hearing/seeing that Lovett & *Co* is a True statement! Keep truckin', man! 🙂🙂 PS: What is worse? A break in a cable or 1 bolt left over after repairing the washing machine?
@@highpath4776 THAT particular bolt was sneakily ADDED by the wife to the pile of parts because she wanted a NEW washer instead of the antique umpteen-times-repaired machine...
Moore's Law has ended. It's no longer possible to physically shrink integrated circuits any further than they have been, because if you make the electrical conductors too narrow, the electrons get almost literally "bogged down" due to there not being enough electron "holes" left for them to propagate through.
@@melkiorwiseman5234 So... instead of laying the conductors down, rotate them to stand on edge. That is, if they are not already thicker than they are wide... 😐 But that still leaves the issue of inter-conductor capacitance. [sigh...]
@@Scott-i9v2s I gather that the conductors are getting down to being only a few atoms wide. A conductor which is only a few atoms wide isn't going to be able to support even its own weight if made more than a few atoms high.
17:10 You gotta do what you gotta do, but XMODEM is soooo inelegant. You're going to end up having to hack around the file padding due to lack of file length, it doesn't support batching, and the checksumming is super weak. I guess the lack of CRC makes the Centurion implementation easier... except you definitely want to checksum uploads in some way anyhow. I know you all will get it done, XMODEM is just a bad memory for me.
Connor Krukosky appears to have some disks for the centurion, I think, saw them in this video around 15-20 seconds th-cam.com/video/wJyiHsfJLEI/w-d-xo.html
honestly man people like to say computers are these ultra complex machines, but in reality, their very simple machines lol. The manufacturing of them is where the complexity is. Designing the logic gates and whatnot aint really.
1:54: Time, genetics, and perhaps a trick of the light with selective greying are all playing a risqué practical joke on your brother Jeff by making him look like he "stands with Ukraine" and is angling for a Jon Stewart endorsement on the Disney channel - or like he's maybe just a huge Charlie Chaplin fan. Which is punny, because I guess he and his no doubt lovely wife are "the producers" of all they sell.
@@Toothilymy guess is the fact that the mustache is only black in the middle, making it look like Charlie Chaplin's or Hitlers. The Ukraine references I can not figure out either.
@@bzuidgeest Oh right, they’re using “stands with Ukraine” as a coded reference to the Russian narrative, that it’s a Nazi-run state. Is Jon Stewart / Disney some weird dig at the left? I’m not American or schizo enough for this, lol.
@@Toothily If I told you explicitly, your government _(or TH-cam, like all social media now effectively an extension of your ruling regime; see racket news)_ would censor it. The reply count suggests that's already happened to other users who've responded here.
One Polish YT retrocomputing (MERA400) channel backed up some custom formatted HDD not long ago. He backed stuff up on the magnetic transition level and then decoded FM from that into an image file - just to be sure he doesn't destroy any data by a similar mishap.
In his case the data being backed up was completely unique and if something went wrong it would be lost to history.
Dokładnie.
Yeah, it was amazing to watch.
That will be a hell of a project for the students! Dont put yourself down for this, it`s a lot better than nothing that what they have and gave them a chance to learn more about serial comms! Congrats on the job of keeping the centurions alive!
Lovett Sundries has fabulous products. My wife loves the hand cream, and I use the gardener's soap for cleaning up after dirty projects.
Lovett Sundries: exists.
Society: Do we have to bring back antimacassar doilies?😉
Cable wasn't 99% fine, 98% surely ;-)
Very good!
That's how the math does seem to work out.
Now the Tech School students need to 3D print a set of custom Centurion front panel switch caps for the OPSYS, Select & R/F buttons. A custom set of machined metal switch caps would be great also.
there speaks a hardware tech !
The bit at the end with you calling your self out on breaking the system was actually very funny! Good showmen's ship.
Surely rather than Xmodem, you should consider Kermit. A Centurion port would look lovely on the already massive list of systems it works on, including several of the Centurion's competitors, and the protocol is simple and robust. (And it was always the pits to have to type the filename twice, as Xmodem made you do...)
Agreed. I immediately checked to see if Centurion were on the Kermit implementation list and was very surprised to see it wasn't - that list has some *very* obscure systems. The biggest advantage of Kermit is it's ability to work over non-transparent links but you do need a fairly good implementation of it (eg c-kermit) to beat Y,Zmodem speeds if the link is transparent.
agree. i did a port of Kermit to our custom device back in the 80s. it too would be my choice over Xmodem
Indeed. We even had a version running on Gould/SEL MPX 32/77's written in FORTRAN. And THAT is an obscure system!!! lol
I have to add my support for Kermit. It was an awesome tool on my old Kaypro 10 and I often swore by it. ;)
I always found Kermit way too overengineered and bloatware than just a simple ZModem protocol which was my favourite in the '80s on 8 bit computers. Of course for mainframes and minicomputers then it was right, especially when it came with the operating system.
Z-Modem allows multiple files and embeds the filenames into the transfer stream. X-Modem is simpler, but will end up being a pain if you need to xfer multiple files :)
Modem7 is essentially the xmodem protocol but allowed batch file transfers.
And communication is one way, unless a block fails a CRC check IIRC. That said I transmitted files straight and never had an issue. We had only hardware flow control going to the PC. Going to the Centurion we had to use character echo since there wasn't any hardware flow control coming from the Centurion and the mux boards only had one byte buffers.
David, I would like to make a hardware Hawk emulator for you, I have embedded development experience. I mostly need documentation for studying the feasibility of it.
Hey! Greeting from Pittsburgh! I never knew of that shop. I will certainly check it out when I'm in that neck of the woods! Keep up the good work. Saving all this old tech makes you a legend in my mind.
2:31 WKRP, of course!!
I'll be curious to see if you can get hardware flow control signals from the mux board. We never were able to and when our hardware guys asked Centurion the answer was no. But maybe they weren't asking the question the right way. We could get the mux boards/Centurion to respond to flow control sending out, just like it works with the printer. If the mux boards can provide hardware flow control for incoming data, I'm going to be a bit upset, that would have made things much better. Also with a serial, wired connection we never had any issues just transferring the data without XModem or other protocols. So you could choose to keep it simple.
At 8:43 the message from the OS says "ELCOME". :) The Hellorld! wiki says your channel is for "retorocomputing". With a working assembler for the Centurion it would be worth spending time to port some other development tools over to the machine. You could work your way up to a basic C compiler. That would make it much easier to port other tools and programs to the Centurion. BTW, in the Hellorld! program it has a JSR which was stated as being a relative call. In assemblers for other (8-bit) computers JSR takes an absolute address. BSR was used for subroutine calls using a relative address.
Here I thought the missing W was an artifact of using TeraTerm in fullscreen mode...
@@horusfalconyeah also why use TeraTerm when PuTTY exists which is also capable of serial communications.
That shop is amazing. It's amazing to see a store like that built up from nothing but love and a lot of hard work.
If Trace50 was bad on the Cable, surely that means 98% of it was working, not 99% 😀
Great video as always, Every time I see those terms in Action, I just want to break out an old computer emulator and get my Hacker fix in!
Did you or your viewers ever see such a terminal that had a blue shade phosphor? Amber or Blue are my favs!
Per 98 vs. 99: I had the same thought, then recalled how to make something to government specification -- measure three times with a micrometer, mark with a piece of chalk, then cut with a chainsaw. 😆
I think I would prefer amber to blue, but it depends on the shade of blue (something like a cyan or sky blue might be okay...)
If you use Linux, there is an open-source terminal emulator called minicom that is easily configurable and can save multiple configurations. I find it very useful in communicating with my CP/M single board computer (an SC126).
You beat me to it.
Or was it zero percent, because it was corrupting data?
@@RWBHere True, true! 🙂
For getting files on and off a disc emulator would the thing. I know you hinted at something being worked on. The hawk and Phoenix drives are fragile, not something you want to let students mess around with regularly. An interface to an sd card would allow them to work on it with risking the unobtainable parts.
Only if he also installs something like, say, a REALLY LOUD FAN on the disk emulator board, to fully emulate the Hawk Drive experience. ;-)
(FWIW, I know of at least two projects that make drive noises for Apple II floppy disks and, IIRC, MFM hard disks. I prefer the quiet, although the drive noises are still nostalgic in a way, hehe.)
@@derekchristenson5711 like IBM putting solenoids in their first keyboards to slap against the outer shell so typist got the loud feedback they were used to from typewriters.
It was great to meet you and see you during your brief passing through of Pittsburgh!
Nice username!
I know you were joking, but I say Genius is a reasonable description :D
Dude designed and built a custom vacuum tube computer. And a custom mechanical relay computer.
I agree with the first guy, your a genius!
That's THE type of advertisements I wanna watch on TH-cam! This, or Chris Hadfield inviting to his Masterclass where he's talking about space exploration.
Sorry to hear about your failures, but I really hope you'll get it going again! To think that one failing conductor can bork the filesystem... Well, shit happens.
Butler Tech surely seems like a nice school to learn actual stuff! Mechanics, electronics, IT, you name it, you get it. I'd even argue it may be better than my alma mater :)
14:19 Actually 98% of the cable is good!!!😅
I was fixing to post the same thing, but wanted to make sure I wasn't duping a comment. Kudos to you :)
I've done last month an fpga configuration memory loader using a 8051 and xmodem to transfer the data from pc, this protocol is so easy to implement. I think that it will take less than a couple of hours to make xmodem checksum and the disk image transfer work from scratch.
I love how you use your platform to lift up those around you!
Still. What a shame about that system. I hope the plans work out!
Wow I love the desk !
Thanks for the video, always a pleasure to watch.
They should use the Centurion for their accounting and payroll!
That system is like a OLIVETTI BCS 3030 which can come with dual 8" floppies or a hard drive.
aww jeez! so close!! but.... being able to serially transfer a disc image would be really interesting to see (since it doesnt exist for that platform, yet).
Back in the day we transferred everything through serial interface. Simple, straightforward and worked, but I never got into the detail programming. Would be interesting now to see the nitty gritty if and how one of the vintage programs others have mentioned here could be ported over.
We need to bring back screw terminal power wires. THAT would fix NVidia's melting power cable problem.
For transferring files to the centurion, a proper communication protocol is of course the nice way. But if the OS is working and the centurion does have any program that lets you type in literal bytes into a file, it might be possible to write a program that does all the steps (logging in, starting that editor, keying in the bytes and saving the file) from your laptop over a plain terminal connection. That would be slow of course, but might be easier to implement than something on the centurion itself. Just a crazy idea. :)
That was my thought also
Awesome effort getting the system running, even though you hit a snag.
Possible/reasonable to build a disk emulator for these things and then not have to ever worry about spinny magnetic media anymore?
You must be new to this channel? :D
Gotta be! Sounds like a fun project too!
@@woldemunster9244 guilty as charged
@@BrianMoore-uk6js I think there at Butler Tech the learning is in the problem solving when things dont work as much as using a (effectively obsolete) system only correctly at the software level.
I’m surprised that you didn’t immediately harvest the removable platter heads from the CPU5 Hawk Drive and install them into the CPU6 Hawk to restore complete functionality to that drive.
That is not something you want to do without your tools, time and patience while on the road.
Whats about floppy emulators to rewrite the OS. Or is there any need of special signals that the common floppy emulators doesn't provide?
Have you considered using something like a GoTek to emulate a floppy drive and reverse engineering the FDC boards you have access to in order to talk to the GoTek?
3:13 - Just noticed in this marketing photo that they cut a hole in the top of the desk to place the terminal inside of. It might look more sleek, but that would be incredibly impractical for so many reasons. It's a good thing they didn't go ahead with that design, at least not for Butler Tech's system.
The early "All-in-One" desk models did have the wood top cutout to match the ADDS terminal shipping at that time. In later production of the "All-in-One" we stopped inserting the ADDS terminal into the desktop because of the cost of cutting and trimming the hole plus the cost of the metal tray below the top for the terminal to sit on.
Damn. Adult Education in Ohio is on some different shit lol.
Up here in Vancouver, our we had some similar shop classes for computers and whatnot. But they were mostly playing around with breadboards and programming in C.
Its interesting stuff, but damn. Imagine having a Centurion to work on. Just an old computer in general would be cool.
"There's only about 4 and a half hours between here and Cincinnati"
Me, who is from the UK: ...
London to anywhere beyond newcastle is a haul no matter how you do it. As is much beyond Bristol.
Good job it wasn't Tulsa then!
I agree, driving in the UK is too much like swimming round inside a fish bowl. The furthest I took my truck was from London to Aberdeen and back (abt 20 hrs driving over 3 days IIRC).
@@ymirthefrostgiant For me it is the hours it takes to go from Clapham to Watford by car , of course if you dont have luggage one can attempt the Southern rail service when it deigns to run. For going beyond Watford one can make goodish progress depending on time of day/night.
@@highpath4776 Mmmm. I live in Essex and a good friend who doesn't drive lives at Fordingbridge in the New Forest. We're planning a trip to Bruges next year, via Dover, so he will have to catch a train from Salisbury either to Weybridge, where I will collect him after driving round the M25 in peak traffic, or he goes all the way into London and out again to Ashford, where I can pick him up on my way to Dover. Neither route is anywhere near ideal for both of us!
Even just Essex to Watford needs very careful timing, so I feel your pain!
@@ymirthefrostgiant Greater Anglia did run a Chelmsford to Basingstoke via North London line which was nearly useful but ran at erractic times. The sussex coastway train might be suitable. My inadvertant journey was driving Dunkirk to Normandy - I didnt realise the bridge in Rouen was so high not that effectively I drove Dover to Plymouth though French roads were faster. I should have booked Portsmouth Cherbourg but i wanted to see Dunkirk, which due to time I didnt , in either Direction
Another sure way of destroying data is to plug the connector the wrong way around...
Usually those ribbon cables have all odd pins as ground and all even pins as signals. Or the other way around.
When you reverse the plug you will connect all signals to ground, and due to signals usually being inverted that will assert the signals that erase or write the entire track...
Is the connector offset to prevent that happening ?
@@highpath4776 There are different ways. For card-edge connectors there often is a "key" slot (which also serves to prevent swapping connectors), for pin connectors like this one, when there is a full connector on the board there is a slot that aligns with a ridge on the connector. But when the board only contains the pin header, the connector can be reversed without problem. And also misaligned by one or more pins, which often leads to similar trouble.
The ribbon pin cables we built at Centurion did have "Keys" in the early days. We stopped "Keying" the ribbon cables after a short time, because having the cable flipped only caused the system not to boot, no damage to any hardware or data. The rule of thumb at Centurion was the ribbon cable trace wire (or pin one) always was down or to the right. Some of the Warrex Centurion ribbon cable types used did have all the even ( or odd ) pins grounded but not in all cases. In some areas of the system that had 20, 26, 50 & 60 pin ribbon cable that used more then 50% of the pins for signal and less than 50% of the pins for ground.
Could you get something like a GoTek to work? Something that can interface with a modern storage medium (say a Flash drive) to store data which can be read by the Centurion via compatible mounted disk image 🙂
Can you manually edit the sector? It isn't that many bytes for a bodged-together internet to serial bridge so you could use the terminal remotely, read your data from your system and transmit to the desk system. Just need to get someone over there with a remotely accessible PC, the right serial cable, and term software.
Yes we could reformat the couple of damage sectors that have the [ 10B0 Format Error ] but the issue is we do not know data needs to be in the newly reformatted sectors to complete the repair of the disk file system.
Is the greyhound your bro's? They have great, gentle temperaments. My sis had a 'rescue' (retired from racing) one, and she (the greyhound) was a really genteel Lady with a capital L. Luckily, she never knew that she'd been stuck with a male name - racing greyhounds here are named after both their parents for bloodstock reasons, so her name was Jamie Crowned.
You involving the high school is an incredibly generous, far-sighted and courageous thing. To be applauded, so I will.
🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌👌✌🐰
Back in college the frat had a dog we think was half greyhound and half German shepherd. The body and color resembled greyhound and head shepherd. That meant the dog was fast and crazy. Could keep up running along side cars and was a true tire-biter: cars and bicycles. Back then nobody bothered with such things as leashes.
@@KameraShy Sis' greyhound was just fast - and I mean faaaaast! More into rabbits than tires though (sorry Usagi!). Good job she trusted sis so much that we could let her off the leash and trust her to be good. Except to rabbits.
He found the secret “read only” mode on the Hawk.
more like "destroy only"
I had one of those printers (TI 810). It's an absolutely solid unit. Used it for years, then gave it away when I moved. The only downside is that it's a dot matrix (so noisy) and uses tractor feed paper. I now have an HP LaserJet 5, which I got for free and rebuilt myself, but I still miss my TI 810.
Re: serial loading of data. Ethernet is a serial protocol :-) What your Centurion needs is a 10BASE-T Ethernet card. How hard could it be? :-)
Adding a Ethernet interface in the Centurion system was looked at around 1985. Because Ethernet networking was very new in 1985 and not being used by our CPA customer base the time to design a Ethernet card, driver and networking protocol was not part of the Centurion business model.
@@kenromaine2387 I'm sure it made sense at the time :-) However, it would probably be easily doable today, and good design experience building the hardware, interfacing it to the Centurion and writing the driver for the OS.
So… I'm restoring an ACT Apricot computer, here in the UK, and people keep pointing me towards "Kermit" for serial data transfer. What might you know about that? It seems it was developed at Columbia University about 25 years ago and adapted to many systems.
heard of it , but thought it was a bit older than that. Have you looked at some f the UK Personal Computer World mags they had a bit on the Apricot and I sort of (badly) ran a 4 system network of them - problem was the company was not quite sure what the business model was they wanted to use the computers for and the commercial software was a bit too expensive compared to the system they were using (which was a computer posting bureau basically for accounts and payroll only)
So... As far as I know Kermit is one of many protocols to transfer files over a serial link (of the likes of Xmodem/Xmodem-1K, Ymodem and Zmodem), and that it should behave more or less like Zmodem, you initiate the transfer on one side, and on the receiving side you tell the terminal program to expect to receive files using Kermit.
That's all I got atm, I've mostly used XModem-1K (which is the same as Xmodem just with bigger data packets) and Zmodem..
Kermit is a software with which you can connect to a Computer via serial and can also comfortably transfer files. It has been ported to many systems. The drawback is that the file transfer built into Kermit is safety-oriented and is much slower than other methods like the *modem family. If the amount of data is low enough and /or you have high speed serial it still could be worth it for ease of use.
Even installing those big heavy rack-drawer units below waste level still scares me. One slight misalignment turns drawer runners and rails into razor blades with barbed ends, ready for the next unsuspecting person to use as a lift handle. Then they want to pull the whole rack over on top of you. The big desk thing is the right idea when it's balanced and heavy duty enough. I never want that stuff above waste level unless it's all on heavy duty carts, never ever above 3 1/2 feet. The gear I work on only tops out @ 90 lbs, slightly smaller but the finger danger is just as bad.
I installed Hawk drives in Warrex-Centurion systems on the manufacturing floor at Centurion and in the customers office by myself for 10 years with zero cut or pinched fingers. Could you hurt yourself by installing or replacing the Hawk into the CDC Hawk rail system, yes if you are not careful.
I stopped at 12:04. I am terrified continuing to watch. 😂 I guess I will just keep existing in a state of hyperposition where that system might still be alive.
i'm surprised you haven't got an sdcard based interface on it which triggers drive activity.
Ooh yay new video!
Every time I hear about that system at Butler HS I wonder why anybody would keep a unique antique like that in service at a school when it could easily be functionally replaced by a Raspberry Pi hooked up to a keyboard. Surely it's better for the kids to have field experience on a modern Linux SBC than an operating system and hardware that will never run in production again?
Surely it's not either-or? A RasPi will be basically nothing in the school's budget. If they want to have that as an option, it is one.
But you'd also be surprised how many mainframes and minicomputers from the 70s are still around - and when their hardware isn't, their drive images and original COBOL software still are! Tons of IT workers specialise in COBOL on old hardware and emulated old software.
Starting to understand what it was like being a field tech back then? I had so many spare (spare[spare]) parts in the back of my car I probably should have had more insurance on it.
Someone in another comment suggested he "just swap" some heads on the spot. That is something a field tech might not be able to do in an hour or two, but not an enthusiast who does it as a hobby.
Talk about nail-biter. With no removable medium on the Centurion desk system, you get one shot for xmodem to work correctly. Xmodem is what we used to use to reflash routers, but the boot ROM had xmodem built into the ROM, so if something hung or the battery on your WFWG 3.11 laptop went dead you could try again.
An alternative that is well within the community's capability is to upgrade the backplane to a boot rom that supports the diagnostic card (unless they did that already, I forget), and then create a custom card that simply contains a full platter only version of the xmodem program, that boots like the diag card does. Given how thoroughly the diagnostic card was reversed engineered, I'm pretty sure creating such a card would be rather simple.
@@kevincathcart4680 Thanks for the input. That sounds like a neat project.
Would it have been possible to add a bodge wire in the 50 pin cable similar to repairing bad traces on pcbs?
Depends on the type of the cable and data bitrate. In this case that is what he probably did. More precisely - just solder over the break.
@@jwhite5008 I have jumped around a break in a Hawk 50 pin I/O cable in a pinch before. Scrape of the damaged wire area two dabs of solder and a inch of mod wire as a temp fix.
So, I had another thought: In addition to a nice serial file transfer utility (Kermit, perhaps?), what about a program that lets you edit the raw data on the Hawk drive? I've seen them for various computers over the years, sometimes for use on the system itself, sometimes for use on a different system (so the drive isn't, well, being used for anything at that moment). I've only had to do it for a couple of my CP/M kit computers, and that was just to set up a modern-ish drive for use in CP/M (and both of those used tools on a third computer to edit the drive), but I seem to recall there being programs for the Apple II that let you just play God with raw disk sectors and such.
Could one of your brilliant Discord members, who has already programmed something for the Centurion (perhaps whoever is working on the Xmodem program?), whip up a sector editor that would let you literally reach into the disk, find the "hole... blown in the file system", and patch it by hand? Perhaps by overwriting it with E5 or whatever value the Centurion's OS uses for empty, formatted sectors, for instance? 🤔
My question is with all the problems these hard drives have had. Is there anyway to make new platters, or wire up a more modern hard drive into these old machines?
I think he has enough platters, no non-crashed heads. Grafting a head might be possible but unreasonable amount of work. The card and OS seem to require exact tech of hawk/finch i.e. bit clock rate.
You could emulate a HDD to a card, emulate the card itself, or write an OS driver to a new card.
Cards themselves are old - I'd try making a new card. But I agree that it needs doing - hawks may fail.
@@jwhite5008 Having a non CDC Hawk drive work on the Centurion is a problem because the Centurion DSKI/DSKII disk controller and Centurion's odd sector format of 400 bytes of 16 sectors per track and two tracks per cylinder is totally non-standard with today's disk drives & controllers. Not having the source code for the Centurion OPSYS limits changes to the OPSYS disk I/O software drivers needed to add a new disk I/O system into the OPSYS. Not having to keep 40 year old Hawk drives with very limited parts running is part of the fun.
All this because of a cable failure! Ouch. If I may suggest it, on the return trip you may want to bring more than one string for your bow. Bring a floppy drive, an FFC, and the disks to use that method. Keep them packed and try your X/Y/Zmodem solution first. If that fails, break out the actual hardware and have at it. Nothing succeeds quite like success.
Late Edit: Can't remember if that accursed cable got repaired or replaced. If the connectors are IDC type, it's simple enough to remove the connector at the faulty end, move it back to where the wire is intact, and re-attach.
Too bad we can't just slap a usb port into that thing... I kinda wonder if maybe something like a Go-Tech could be made to work as a substitute floppy drive?
If you're write data failed doesn't that mean that the disc is read only?
except for the working erase function
Precisely! I am missing this point too???
Ahh ... the Erase command, whilst still needing to do a write, uses a different signal!
@@suvetar I was not sure why the op sys was being erased though, I thought only newfile not changefile things were being written.
@@highpath4776 The directory would need to be updated when the new file is created. So, erase the old directory info, write the new directory and, uh oh...
That didn't look like a puppy? Was the camera pointed at the correct end of the dog? 😂
66.6k subs.
Nice
Maybe you would free Hyperterm 6.3 for windows
You are the man :D
You should really see if you can't clone some of the old PCBs like the FCC card
wasnt the problem some of them are double sided and some double with internal sandwiched routes too ?
or emulate them entirely. It should not be too hard to reimplement most of the floppy interface in FPGA + microcontroller, in fact you might get away with just a microcontroller. I can't imagine the protocol is too complex on these systems.
@@highpath4776 Sure, but it's not like we can't make them today, it just costs a bit more
You should be making an interface to get SD-Cards working on it... Bus-direct...
i Would have just said it was all working and run away.
and then which company pays for the incorrect malfunctioning cable consequential loss
Why am I thinking, Arduino and a Hawk drive emulator? Or are you really adamant on using period correct hardware and protocols?
OK, so Moore's Law is declining, but Murphey's Law still seems to be working perfectly...
Compliments to all involved in the Good News part! 🙂
Commiserations for the success of the Bad News part. 😞
Let us thank whoever is responsible for the Ugly News part finding the bit bucket! 😐
Loved hearing/seeing that Lovett & *Co* is a True statement!
Keep truckin', man! 🙂🙂
PS: What is worse? A break in a cable or 1 bolt left over after repairing the washing machine?
depends where the bolt should have gone
@@highpath4776 THAT particular bolt was sneakily ADDED by the wife to the pile of parts because she wanted a NEW washer instead of the antique umpteen-times-repaired machine...
Moore's Law has ended. It's no longer possible to physically shrink integrated circuits any further than they have been, because if you make the electrical conductors too narrow, the electrons get almost literally "bogged down" due to there not being enough electron "holes" left for them to propagate through.
@@melkiorwiseman5234 So... instead of laying the conductors down, rotate them to stand on edge. That is, if they are not already thicker than they are wide... 😐
But that still leaves the issue of inter-conductor capacitance. [sigh...]
@@Scott-i9v2s I gather that the conductors are getting down to being only a few atoms wide. A conductor which is only a few atoms wide isn't going to be able to support even its own weight if made more than a few atoms high.
A hawk drive emulator using a SD card? Already floppy and SCSI emulators available.
17:10 You gotta do what you gotta do, but XMODEM is soooo inelegant. You're going to end up having to hack around the file padding due to lack of file length, it doesn't support batching, and the checksumming is super weak. I guess the lack of CRC makes the Centurion implementation easier... except you definitely want to checksum uploads in some way anyhow.
I know you all will get it done, XMODEM is just a bad memory for me.
No Kermit on the Centurion?
Dang, that sucks that just one cable made all those problems
damn, damn and damn
I Love-tt!
ZModem!!
Connor Krukosky appears to have some disks for the centurion, I think, saw them in this video around 15-20 seconds
th-cam.com/video/wJyiHsfJLEI/w-d-xo.html
kool
honestly man people like to say computers are these ultra complex machines, but in reality, their very simple machines lol.
The manufacturing of them is where the complexity is. Designing the logic gates and whatnot aint really.
:-) i love your stuff
dos 7.1 8:50/18:36 wow 👈👺👀👀👍
Note this is not MS DOS 7.1 it is Warrex-Centurion OPSYS called DOS 7.1-E.
What about reverse engineering those broken heads?
You I've in Texas
Notification Squad! :D
platypusses !
I'm presuming that's your Brothers hound at the end. If so, he has excellent taste. We have 2 whippets, who our 2 y.o. thinks are her best friends!
I hate the PR stuff.
i hate patreonizin begging for money
1:54: Time, genetics, and perhaps a trick of the light with selective greying are all playing a risqué practical joke on your brother Jeff by making him look like he "stands with Ukraine" and is angling for a Jon Stewart endorsement on the Disney channel - or like he's maybe just a huge Charlie Chaplin fan. Which is punny, because I guess he and his no doubt lovely wife are "the producers" of all they sell.
What the heck are you on about?
@@Toothilymy guess is the fact that the mustache is only black in the middle, making it look like Charlie Chaplin's or Hitlers. The Ukraine references I can not figure out either.
@@bzuidgeest Oh right, they’re using “stands with Ukraine” as a coded reference to the Russian narrative, that it’s a Nazi-run state. Is Jon Stewart / Disney some weird dig at the left? I’m not American or schizo enough for this, lol.
"Standing with Ukraine" sounds like a euphemism for an awkward boner
@@Toothily If I told you explicitly, your government _(or TH-cam, like all social media now effectively an extension of your ruling regime; see racket news)_ would censor it. The reply count suggests that's already happened to other users who've responded here.
082384... still my 5th bday!
Back in the day I was a big fan of WXModem