Some more Lilith / Ceres software recovered.

[jdreesen]

I was at the Museum fur Kommunikation in Berne yesterday, where I was allowed to recover the contents of the harddisk of the Lilith they have on display.
That would be this particular specimen : https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilith_(Computersystem)

Among the goodies recovered is the source code for the single-pass Modula-2 compiler for the Lilith, a NS32032 assembler, written in Modula-2, NS32032 assembler source for the build-in low level monitor of the Ceres-1, and M2 source for a program they used during development of the Ceres, where the Ceres is controlled via a serial channel and a 16bit parallel bus from a Lilith.

Plus source code for disk drivers and source for a couple of games. 1890 files in total, and Medos, the Lilith OS, does not know subdirectories.....

 

[Al Kossow]

have copies of the firmware from this rev of machine been dumped?

 

[jdreesen]

have copies of the firmware from this rev of machine been dumped?

Yes, they have. I'll make a documentation set with ROM sets and PCB pics.

But basically there are only 2 Lilith versions :
- the first version with the Honeywell-Bull D120 cartridge drive and 128K x 16 mem. This has bootcode as part of the microcode, and is the machine I emulated in Emulith, my Lilith emulator.
- the second version has the 15MB IMI5018 MFM drive, on a WD1001-85 controller, and 256K x 16 memory. This one has a 2K boot-eprom, with mcode, on the IFU-board.

There are some more housing variants, but these all come down to the above 2.

Bear's machine seems to have a newer version of the IFU-board( instruction fetch unit) , called "2MB-IFU", suggesting that his machine can master 2Mb memory. I suspect the firmware to be the same, would nevertheless be worthwhile to check this. If you cannot read 82s191's directly it is trivial to make an adapter to convert it to a 2716 type pinout, see the 2 datasheets.

BTW this is the correct display for the Lilith : http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ballBrothers/5-17-1042_HD_Series_Monitor_Service_Manual_198006.pdf
Good luck finding one.....

Also funny to find the Lara-source, in the disk I recovered, for some of the documents recently added to Bitsavers's Ceres directory...

 

[Al Kossow]

actually, it's quite easy (at least for me)
it is the monitor used on the Corvus Concept and I have a bunch of them, if Bear needs one.
variations were also used on the Xerox 8010
they can have either ECL or TTL video input and came in a range of horizontal frequencies.

do you know what the CRT tube type and size is? if it was interlaced, it may have a medium persistance phosphor

 

[jdreesen]

do you know what the CRT tube type and size is?

The exact monitor type is Ball HD17, CRT is a CE706M17P40GS. This would be a 17" monitor with very slow phosphor.

Too bad shipping these across the ocean is a no-go these days. I could do with a second one...

[Edit] the Lilith has a TTL output, not ECL.

 

[jdreesen]

I added the following to my FTP server : ftp://ftp.dreesen.ch/Ceres/Ceres_src.zip

Here you will find, for the Ceres-1 :

- NS32K Assembler source for the build in monitor CBUG + user manual
- Textfile descriptions of the Ceres and various stages of its development ( *yellow* )
- Various Modula-2 sources for Medos, the original OS for the Ceres ( Ceres started out with Modula-2, and only later moved to Oberon )
- Various DOK files describing the above.

No guarantee that this is in any way complete, files are in Lilith-internal format, with only EOL-charcter changed, and so and so on....

Jos

 

[whartung]

Wow.

FTP. Many browsers no longer support FTP, FYI.

But, thanks for making this available.

Addenda: Interesting, my Mac no longer has an ftp client out of the box.

 

[nigwil]

on macos you might have Curl from the command prompt:

n@Mac-mini % curl ftp://ftp.dreesen.ch/Ceres/Ceres_src.zip > Ceres_src.zip
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 910k 100 910k 0 0 42414 0 0:00:21 0:00:21 --:--:-- 187k
n@Mac-mini % 
n@Mac-mini % ls -l
total 1920
-rw-r--r-- 1 nw staff 931840 5 Dec 12:03 Ceres_src.zip
n@Mac-mini %

 

[whartung]

Oh, thanks. That worked.

What's curious is that while I downloaded the file, it's a tar file not a zip file. Dunno if curl did that for me or what.

 

[jdreesen]

Oh, thanks. That worked.

What's curious is that while I downloaded the file, it's a tar file not a zip file. Dunno if curl did that for me or what.

My use of the following unix command might have something to do with that.... " tar cvf Ceres_src.zip Ceres"
I'll change it, sorry for the brainfart.

Yes, I know that FTP is on its way out, have not yet found an equally convenient solution.