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Fixing serial communications is fun :-)

Still far from fully working but FS-A1ST is starting to show some things.

While waiting for a potential dump of the Visual 50 character ROM I took a look at another Visual system available on Bitsavers, the XDS-19P:



It can enter the boot menu successfully and I've more or less implemented the keyboard:



The LANCE is also working:



However, trying to "romboot" just resets the system. I assume the ROMs needed for that are undumped (there are 4 empty sockets). Finding the software needed for network booting is probably close to impossible, the whole system is basically unknown to the internet.

This got dumped, so I tested it, it worked just enough to boot and let me play for a bit. Already submitted and approved, happy March 10 or something.

I've committed the driver. It works reasonable well as far as I can test it. I've setup a virtual Debian installation to provide BOOTP and TFTP services for it, and it successfully tries to network boot:



Quite amazing actually, that a current Linux installation (I've used Debian 12) can provide software support for a terminal that is now 34 years old.

I have a version 3.1L for X15 and I think X19 as well:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mIJJQ-RY9x4EchpY6J2X8lJl4Jl9e_6-/view?usp=share_link

I once had a version 3.0.2 but it failed to restore from a QIC backup tape unfortunately.

I have two X15 so I can dump the ROM cartridge from it as well (not sure if it is any different from the X19 though)

I actually have the manual for it as well. Need to dig it out.

Thank you Mattis, that's amazing! I can successfully boot the file:



The build-in window manager and apps:



Running flwm with a few applications:



A lot of fun to play around with

Bitsavers managed to acquire a bunch of dumps for the Visual 50, including the chargen ROM and the keyboard. It looks like this currently:


(connected to a Debian system, running MC)


(first page of "advanced" setup mode)

The way attributes are handled is still a mystery (so it's missing things like underline).

it looks like I remembered the color of the screen incorrectly from the one I bought too long ago

IBM 5100 is now working pretty nicely. Thanks to the good work of others (Christian Corti and Tom Stepleton), most of the firmware for this very firmware-heavy system had already been dumped. There's also copious good quality IBM documentation available, which made the work fairly straightforward.

Without repeating all the information that's better presented elsewhere, the IBM 5100 was a very early (1975) portable computer, with its own PALM (apparently "Put All Logic in Microcode") single-card CPU. The CPU and much of the logic in the system is built up from IBM gate arrays, and even the firmware is stored in IBM's own ROS (read-only storage) chips; this is not so surprising for the period, however it did present some challenges for dumping.

An interesting point is that the APL and BASIC languages were ported to this machine by emulating their original big-iron hosts (IBM System/360 Model 50 for APL and IBM System/3 Model 6 for BASIC), so the firmware contains not just the language interpreters, but system emulation code as well.

The emulation runs both languages, with configurations between 16K to 64K of RWS (read-write storage in IBM).

APL (the asterisk is the exponentiation operator):


BASIC:


What's not done:
- tape drive
- printer (I'm not very interested in tackling this)
- communications options (also not too excited about them)
- 5110, 5120 and 5130 models, including floppy disk drive