Date   : Thu, 16 Mar 2006 13:42:24 +0000
From   : Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...>
Subject: Re: 6502s and SASI/SCSI.

Rob wrote:
> At 10:55 16/03/2006, Jules Richardson wrote:
> Nightingales are about as dumb as you can get.. you may get away with as 
> little as a 9V battery across the line connecting them together..

Now that'd be interesting if it works - phone line voltage is normally, what, 
50V or so? Presumably something's also needed to spot that one modem's 
dialling, then generate the ringing pulses such that the 'remote' modem will 
pick up.

There are still a few old-timers over on uk.telecom who I expect will know (or 
know someone who does)

>> Unless of course you have a have a small home exchange and don't 
>> mention it...
> 
> It's pretty cheap to find old small PABX's.

Yep, I'm sure they can be found pretty easily...

We'd *love* to find a kosher Strowger exchange in order to support museum
telecom-related stuff, just in case anyone happens to know where there is
one (yeah, right). Nothing fancy, we'd just like to make a feature of it as
well as making it do useful work; uniselectors are pretty fascinating to
watch! (there's a fantastic running one at MOTAT in Auckland)

>> Plus of course getting some sort of entire viewdata system 'online' 
>> using vintage hardware would be rather cool... (I'm not sure if any 
>> server-side software still exists, though)
> 
> Micronet used to have a pdp-11 at Herbal Hill for doing the offline 
> editing on.  I really wish I could remember what the software was 
> called, but of course I only ever saw the viewdata side of it, (Apart 
> from when doing the backups, but that wasn't exactly a get-to-know-it 
> experience!)  Having said that, it wasn't a pure "Prestel" experience - 
> you actually got closer to that from CommunITel or the Gnome software. 
> (Running on Beebs, of course!)
> 
> I wonder what happened to that machine - did it move up to {where did 
> they go?} with them when EMAP sold out, and they all moved in with 
> Prestel, or was it scraped?

I've not heard of it existing in private hands, unfortunately. Mike Ross is 
one of the few collectors of PDP big iron in the UK (or was, he's in the US 
these days) - he may know what happened to it. I'll try and remember to give 
him a prod....

cheers

Jules