CTOs (Cancelled-to-order) Stamps

I’ve been collecting stamps for nearly 40 years now and I’ve found a lot of them advertised as used when in fact they are not used, they are simply cancelled. Unfortunately, a number of countries issue stamps in huge quantities that are cancelled during the printing process and have never actually been on an envelope. While this does make these stamps available globally, it also allows less-than-reputable dealers to sell these as used. Many new collectors do not realize this; I can remember when I first started collecting wondering why I was getting all of these cancelled stamps that still had their gum. It didn’t take long to find out that these stamps are printed by the millions and are essentially worthless.

It’s mostly a case of buyer-beware, as many dealers don’t bother mentioning whether the stamps are actually used for postage or CTO. Next time you go to buy a few used Hungary stamps, keep in mind that they probably never saw the inside of a post office nor the face of an envelope but were created specifically for sale to collectors.

S-100 Boards

I recently purchased several S-100 boards from eBay; the prices were good and I figured one of these days I’ll find some documentation for them, or I’ll have the time to chase signals enough to figure out what they do. One looks like an old Winchester MFM or RLL drive board, given the connectors and the number of pins. Another resembles some sort of IDE adapter board. All are by manufacturers with little or no information available. Makes things interesting, I guess. Also have an Alpha Micro AM-919 backplane with lots of slots. Not currently hooked up, still sitting in the shipping box, but should be handy one of these days. Hopefully I’ll come across a set of drawings for it, just to make sure everything is wired the way my smaller AM board is.

Next College Session

Starting the next session on Monday. Systems Analysis and Design Methods, along with Java Programming. I’ve worked as a System Analyst, so I’ll be interested to see what the best practices are vs. what I was actually doing. I already know some of it was wrong, but the corporate culture insisted… 🙂 I did try to work with the users and managers as much as possible to understand the underlying processes and demands.

Also found http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com. Looks like MS must have figured out that you can’t survive on charging people for everything associated with your basic product. They actually have some good training, based on my initial visits. Looking forward to going through several of their programs to see what I learn. The price is good, at least (free).

Next: CLEP and DSST testing. Hopefully, I can bypass about 5 or 6 classes.

Another college session down

Yet another college session down, this time Programming III and Western Civ II. Hopefully, both grades will be respectable. Next up? Not sure yet; I’d like to take a couple of technical classes this time with no “fluff” (don’t tell anyone I said that). However, the tech classes can get kinda busy… Oh, well, so many classes, so few years left to live. Come on lottery! Can you say permanent student?

Ext2Fsd Installation on Windows 8

Ext2Fsd may or may not be directly supported on Win 8. Either way, I couldn’t get it to install without a couple of changes. Your mileage may vary, of course…

Right click on the installation file for 0.51; this is the version that I’m using. Select Properties and then change the compatibility settings to Run as Administrator and Windows 7.

My experience so far has been that everything appears to work properly, but I’m using a file synch program just in case. The initial copying that I attempted missed a lot of files but I might not have given everything time to load properly.

As a note, if you are unable to display the files, check on Ext2Fsd program to make sure the service is started. Otherwise, Windows thinks you have a blank drive.

I’m using Ext2Fsd with a Xubuntu drive to copy my data off. So far, so good…

S-100 and Other Computing History from Dr. Alan Wilcox

For those who might be interested, I met with Dr. Wilcox last year at his home and took possession of a number of items relating to his books regarding the 68000 CPU and his S-100 board. I’ve unfortunately run behind on getting these items onto the ‘Net as he was gracious enough to agree that I could post scans of all of his hand-written notes, etc., so long he received proper credit. I haven’t had time to start that part of the process, but I thought I’d make a quick post of his remaining 68k S-100 board, which was wire-wrapped. I’ve just now started getting enough of a system together to be able to bring some of my boards live, but look forward to booting this board as well as the N8VEM 68k board.

(Sorry, these are a little shaky. I haven’t quite gotten the use of the new phone yet. Will post better pics with wife’s camera.)

 

Front

Back

Also, does anyone recognize this enclosure/S-100 computer? It has a plain white top and bottom, black front and punched back for several DB25 connectors. It contains a CCS Z80 CPU board and (2) CCS 16K Static Ram boards.

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