What a wild ride!! Definitely a fascinating look into a Unix system of old before the boom of the personal computer market. Bad clock chip, bad flip-flop from a battery leak, faulty reset circuit in the power supply, and missing/hidden partition for the docs on the system design. Heck of a ride.
Hope you kick the human malware to the curb soon! I've already seen all of the Plexus P/20 videos as I've been captivated by this series, but I'm going to have to watch this supercut to go through it again. :)
Damn. Sorry to hear you’ve got COVID. I might leave this supercut until the weekend when I’m working in my own projects (currently putting together an RC2014). Looking forward to the follow-ups though. This Plexus series has been really fun to watch. I think I like it because I KNOW that there’s no other videos about this machine because the machine itself is (probably) unique. That makes this series very inspiring because you’re essentially going from first principles - with a little help from the community, of course. Very cool!
If I start at 7:40 PM I can be done around midnight, including the snack and other pauses. 😍 Great. 🤓 I already watched the series. It was awesome, BTW. 😀
Thanks Adrian - really enjoyed watching this project. When I went to university, we used an NCR Tower computer running on a Motorola 68020 that ran Unix System V serving 40 terminals for us third year students. Forgot how many minicomputers there were before Intel 386 gave you a cheap workstation grade performance and companies started making dual CPU servers and the likes of Sparc,Mips and Motorola exited the mini/ws market.
Get well soon Adrian and thanks for your wonderful videos I enjoyed learning about this interesting computer and your efforts to fix it. Looking forward to the next update. I know if you publish videos very regularly (as you do) people can start to assume the worse if you miss one or are late publishing it! So I hope you don't feel any pressure to publish something, rest up and get well!
A serial port text mode ansi version since it doesn't have a video output or grapics card lol! Maybe a planet x text adventure would be more appropriate.
Ooh, rare computers! If you're interested in other rare computers, maybe have a look at the iAPX 432 architecture. From what I understand it was sold around the Portland area so maybe you could find one of the last extant machines.
At 02:40:48 you put the text on screen "I'm now in contact with that person!", meaning the engineer designing the Plexus. Could you please elaborate on that? I'm super curious about the technical details, but also (maybe even more) I do want to know about the reaction you got from that person getting contacted about a quite surely anonymous job they did some 30 years ago, with thousands of people now hanging on the edge of their seats. We really are all going through a mystery though your videos, get well soon Adrian!
Interesting: If I traveled to the end of the rainbow As Dame Fortune did intend, Murphy would be there to tell me The pot's at the other end. -- Bert Whitney
Another Glitch in the Call (Sung to the tune of a recent Pink Floyd song.) We don't need no indirection We don't need no flow control No data typing or declarations Did you leave the lists alone? Hey! Hacker! Leave those lists alone! Chorus: All in all, it's just a pure-LISP function call. All in all, it's just a pure-LISP function call.
3:04:54 directly above the flip-flop and resistor to the left of it there are several etching lines running parallel left to right. the top most line under the white bodge or is that painted white line? anyway the etching under it is broken several times.
Get well soon! The one thing I'd say about a "supercut" when you're unable to do a normal video is to maybe do an older series, rather than one from the past couple of months?
btw,, you loose com port connection maybe because in devmgmt.msc on the ports the power management is on. Usually it is off on COM ports, but it is on on PCIe or PCI add in COM ports.
my youtube feed is full of extremely depressing and scary political stuff that I can't stomach. Thank you for posting this and consuming all of my RU-vid time. This isn't sarcasm, and I truly appreciate it. 💙
More like the ultra long winding cut. I always skip most of these videos (I mean the original video parts) to get to the relevant information. Proper editing would cut most videos down to maybe 20 minutes of actual information. The amount of digression is incredible.
You can, in fact, mount a partition from within a larger image file. I do it all the time; it's quite handy for grabbing data off of image backups, or just exploring them. The key is that you have to pass an "-o offset=X" parameter to the mount command, to tell it where the desired partition starts. Here's a snippet from my personal "brain dump" wiki showing how to do it. run fdisk -l whatever.img note the Units: sectors of 1 * X number. This is the sector size. now take the number from the Start column of the partition you want to mount and multiply it by the sector size (from above). This is the offset of the partition that you want to mount. Run mount -v -o offset=OFFSET -t TYPE whatever.img /mnt/whatever to mount it. Don't forget to umount it when you're done! So in the case of your test image at 37:51, the command would be "mount -v -o offset=8704 -t msdos ~/test_st255_2.img /mnt/whatever"
