The Desk System Centurion Lives!

[@TheTamaranch]

Oh my God you're in the Fish Bowl... That used to be Newman's room. I remember those Cooler Master shuttle systems sitting right behind you. Those were actually the main systems we set up for student use. When I was there, everything was updated to am4 systems with 5700xts and aios. All of which were assembled by us. Feels like a lifetime ago. I'm elated you have a special place in your heart for BT just like every one of us that's passed through there

[@FreejackVesa]

Seems like a really cool vo-tech High School. I would have been in heaven had my high school had a teaching machine shop.

[@TheTamaranch]

@FreejackVesa aye, it was. Going there was still by far the best decision I've made so far in my 22 years of life.

[@UsagiElectric]

That's awesome that you graduated from BT! If you ever swing by the school again, say hi to the Centurion!

[@s8wc3]

Is everything alright here, college employee Newman?

[@FreejackVesa]

@@TheTamaranch that's awesome! I went to boarding school and it ended up being one of the absolute best periods of my life. I learned a lot, made really close friends, and learned how to support/live on my own in a sense. I would love to go back and do it again. That was over 30 years ago now

[@toddbu-WK7L]

"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." - Archimedes "Give me a memory monitor and a serial port on which to load it, and I shall fix this Centurion." - David Lovett

[@wtmayhew]

Serial ports, word length, parity settings, flow control signals and countless hours of xmodem = job security in the 1970s and 1980s.

[@UsagiElectric]

With a memory monitor and caffeine, we can very slowly copy data!

[@KeritechElectronics]

Caesar's Legion technology is no strange to Dave, haha!

[@wesleymays1931]

you mentioned the cpu5 not working with the diag card, and I thought "oh no is he gonna boot into tos6, hotplug the card and jump into diag tos?" I hate that I guessed correctly you (and I guess Ken Romaine since he showed you the forbidden art of hotplugging) are an absolute madman, _and I am here for that_

[@UsagiElectric]

Hot swapping cards is something I never would have even thought about unless Ken had done it multiple times in front of me!

[@sjsoftware72]

Hot swapping the cards could blow a transmitter/receiver/transceiver. While that would be a bad day at the office it's all through hole components, they're more or less replaceable and the tolerances on the bus would probably mean it's unlikely.

[@larryk731]

I think you are the person who is most knowledgeable about this obscure mini computer in the world.

[@markpitts5194]

Him and his small army of helpers.

[@ricardog2165]

Ken Romaine (retired Centurion tech) probably knows just as much, if not more.

[@UsagiElectric]

Ken Romaine definitely knows way more than I do, but I'm trying my best to keep up!

[@dnwheeler]

I love the idea of using a lock pick to switch the DIP switch settings - it's a key step in the process.

[@sjsoftware72]

I see what you did there...

[@user-nd8zh3ir7v]

that card from ken probably needs to be reversed engineered! if there is only one still around! great video as always!

[@ricardog2165]

I hope he dumped the ROMs.

[@UsagiElectric]

The ROMs have been dumped and backed up, and the entire card has been reverse engineered, so we have a schematic for it now too!

[@exidy-yt]

This is the kind of story that brings a tear to my eye. SO damn happy you were able to get this working, and even more in that it builds on everyone's help who came before on your initial Centrurion project, Ken Romine (you legend) and the Discord crew that did so much documenting and writing of the emulator and everything else, all that passed on to a school where the kids there can learn about the minicomputers of a past age and use that knowlege as a foundation for tomorrow. How many kids today are understanding hexidecimal and assembly programming? The Butler Tech kids are! (potentially anyway!)

[@UsagiElectric]

I think it's really great that there are a few kids there that are interested in this old beast. Understanding the weird idiosyncrasies of the Centurion can help get a stronger grasp on modern computers!

[@jarms40]

Another victory for late-70s oil and gas accountancy!

[@baronvonschnellenstein2811]

"DRAMATIC REENACTMENT" - 😀 Very good. Props to Valo for taking up the gauntlet of maintaining Butler Tech's Centurion. - A subtitle for this video: "Remember to make your code re-locatable, where possible!"

[@adamsfusion]

Big love to Butler Tech for letting you get your hands on such a great machine.

[@bmartin427]

Hello Valorld!

[@hardlyworgen71]

That poor cat is being so patient with the dog wanting to play.

[@toddbu-WK7L]

Poor cat? I think that it's "poor dog". Who doesn't want to play? Oh yeah, right. Cats. 🙂

[@heckelphon]

It's the look of utter disdain on the cat as the dog goes sniffing around. "Some animals simply lack good manners!"

[@cheeseparis1]

Dude we are on KZbin, we must do semething

[@nurmr]

Floofs!

[@kaitlyn__L]

@@toddbu-WK7L cats just play in a different way!

[@rmcdudmk212]

That is an awesome accomplishment. So glad you guys could get this piece of history up and running again.

[@jasonwilliams5477]

I love the way you explain things. Your excitement is so contagious, and it doesn't matter if I have no idea what the actual meaning of the words you are saying are. The way your saying makes it make complete sense, and it totally brings back those memories of trying all sorts of things and hunting down different versions of the same software to get things loaded, spending hours trying to get the status bar to 100 percent just to have it still not work right,but finally after all the stress and time everything finally works and it's so awesome!!! You're awesome!!!

[@Chris-on5bt]

Ken Romain's diag card. My silly brain sees an analogy to the great sword handed down through the generations so that the next heir might do battle with the forces of entropy and chaos. I probably been reading to much Joseph Cambell

[@burn0u71]

you are a part of a dying breed sir. hats off to you and thank you for your videos. i grew up in the world of C64's, Amigas, PCjr's, 8088 and so on. The Centurion was way before my time. i was born in the 70's.

[@dominick253]

23:14 This is why I love programming. That feeling when you've been working on a project for multiple days and then you finally finally find what's cause and everything to not work properly. 😂😂😂

[@Chris-on5bt]

It gives me hope for the next generation to see a young person like Valo who is put together and out there learning and engaging. David keep doing what you are doing!

[@B0BBYL33J0RD4N]

'And here's where we rapidly got outside of my ability here' is how I feel every time I click on one of your videos. Mostly watching to marvel at old tech. I don't know some 99% of what you talk about.

[@KirkEBarrett]

Alpha micro am100 used these hawks and TI printer. That was my world. The work here is next level. Respect!

[@simon6447]

I think the reason I follow your channel is your problems communicating with the centurion are like my problems communicating with most people !!

[@b4cktr4k24]

Congrats to you, Valo! With an understanding of low level architecture at this level, you are going to far in the world! It's so interesting to see how little memory monitors have changed over the last 40-50 years. If it ain't broke...

[@HelloKittyFanMan]

Wow, hot-swapping cards! You'd probably never dream of doing that on a machine that's even remotely modern; even as far back as ISA! I'm amazed that this can handle it!

[@mikekopack6441]

Need to get the desk system connected up over a modem to yours so you can exchange data!

[@RichardBetel]

Plenty of old routers had the ability to do tcp-to-serial. Should be easy to set up with some thematically old equipment over the internet.

[@Lethgar_Smith]

In 1982 I went to an electronics vocational collage and we had a section on computers. I learned to program in basic on a TRS-80 III, they taught us some machine language programming on those little trainers, and the school had a Heathkit HERO 1 programmable robot that we had to write code for. There was a large computer in the lab with the TRS-80s that was non functional but it was like a credenza with a long bed rail for punch cards to be fed into it and on one end was a yellowish clear plastic cake box with a stack of platters inside. Someone said the head crashed and that's why it didnt run anymore. After I graduated I did not pursue a career in electronics or computers. I just have this weird pile of knowledge that I barely remember much of, and I have no practical use for, but videos like this are very interesting. I remember just enough to follow along with what you're doing without understanding it very deeply. Your videos also bring up a lot of memories of the 2 years I was at that school.

[@mdouglaswray]

The DETAIL in your videos is far above and beyond. EXCITING!!!!!!!

[@williamsquires3070]

(@7:09 or so) This brings back memories (about 128 GB worth) of me spending HOURS typing in AppleSoft BASIC and hex listings into my old Apple ][+ from Nibble magazine. From there, I learned 6502 assembler; it was SO much fun, but I’d have given anything to have a working hard drive!! At least I had 2 5-1/4” floppy drives so I didn’t have to disk swap all day long. I still have a book on the 6502; gotta love those old 8-bit CPUs! 😅 Have fun while it lasts, Mr Usagi!

[@DaniDaDino]

I just got a fever last night, but what could be a better distraction than another amazing UE video!

[@gawkersdeathrattle1759]

Butler Tech sounds like nerdvana. My high school we literally had our computer class taught by the gym teacher... and "taught" is a highly generous description. "Monitored the self-directed use of" would be closer to the truth. I won't complain, the school had hardware I didn't have at home so I was grateful for the access, but there was not much instruction happening in a didactic way, mostly just autodidactic (and more commonly, gaming).

[@KameraShy]

Just like my high school. They had to make up fake classes to justify hiring the gym teachers and football/basketball/baseball coaches.

[@Ragnar8504]

Our teacher wrote Basic code onto the blackboard and we had to copy and try to run it. Zero explanations what each part of the code actually meant, and software that was wildly outdated at that time. Kinda felt like using Windows 95 today or possibly even worse. Immediately after writing the teacher went off onto yet another smoke break and left us to our own devices. 15 minutes later he'd return reeking of stale smoke and, if we were lucky, help us do basic troubleshooting, leaning over us while messing around with our computers. Unsurprisingly he had a heart attack in his mid-50s and retired early.

[@johncloar1692]

Quite an adventure! Glad every thing work out. It is hard to do repairs when you have little resources to aid in the repair. Thanks for the video.

[@marksterling8286]

Made my Sunday watching this video seeing it finally working. Congratulations

[@NateEngle]

It's always very cool when we also get to meet the other faces in the story. Every piece of hardware is a human artifact as relevent to our time in history as a 2 million year old stone tool was to the people who relied on that technology.

[@fantummenelkinstruments1959]

Great story with a fantastic ending! Also, as a side note, Valo means light in Finnish. What a great name!

[@NiallWardrop]

This brings back memories of getting a BBC micro to talk to the programming port on a PLC (which was 9600 baud current loop because, control system). Like this all data was transferred in packets with a start character, end character and crc, also the end character alternated every time so it knew it hadn't missed one. I had to write a 16 bit crc calculator in 6502 assembler.

[@MatroxMillennium]

I really appreciate all the work you put into getting and keeping these systems running, and it's really cool to get to watch the process as well

[@valshaped]

The beautiful thing about file formats is that the only thing differentiating one from anoyher is the program reading the file. It's all bytes in the end

[@NowInAus]

You, Valo and your online friends did an amazing job. Well done guys!

[@Rorschach1024]

That ribbon cable may have been repairable. Usually the problems are either where the cable is crushed, or at the terminations. It may only need to be reterminated with new connectors. If it is crushed, but is overweight, you might be ablecto cut and reterminate.

[@ancipital]

Really really cool stuff - so much obscure tech out there that was used by companies and it's great to keep all this stuff alive and usable else we lose so much of our IT history.

[@kromaine13]

Now to complete Centurion desk model system, you need to move the ADDS terminal to the right of the desk. Any one have a late 1970s, early 1980s secretary office chair to donate to the school. Regards, Ken R

[@tdog577345]

That TOS6 program looked similar to the computer hacking screens from Fallout games! How cool 6:33

[@mUbase]

As a lover of vintage ,ancient and obscure UK computers I'm finding these vids absolutely fascinating. What was really cool was how you and Val0 turned into spirit animals at the end ! ;)

[@TechBench]

Laplink. You wrote Laplink for the Centurion! Just wow...!

[@RikkiCattermole]

A trick you can do in a pinch, is to download the file into memory at a different offset. Then have a small program that copies it to the right location and then jumps to it. You should be able to write that on the fly. No need to have the diag card if you can dump that into memory. Ignoring the button press to reinstall thing, maybe it would be a good idea to swap out ram chips/roms with a flick of a button to get into the memory monitor. So that you don't have to mess around with the diag card and it can be permanently installed.

[@Jimmbo11111a]

This channel is absolutely addictive. Great job man .

[@Nexxxeh]

Great work, well done to all involved.

[@toonvanderpas7604]

Thanks (and congratulations!) for another great episode and victory!

[@bmobert]

In Star Trek, when Jordi or O'Brian or Scotty is working on old hardware, this is how I always imagined it to be like. Not what yo use on the show, but like this.

[@skfalpink123]

Outstanding job! It's sad how much historically significant computing equipment is scrapped - and it's not a new thing! At the end of WWII, Churchill ordered Tommy Flowers to destroy all plans for his Colossus code breaker (which he did), while the last of the actual Colossus machines was broken apart in the 1960s. Even Turing's machines (which Churchill described as "the Golden Goose that never stopped laying") were completely scrapped once the war was over. OK, we now have perfectly working replicas, but even the best replica of the Mona Lisa - would never be the Mona Lisa.

[@binarydinosaurs]

Talk about edge of the seat stuff! Amazing work everyone 😁

[@mbraun777]

Another item struck off the bucket list. Congrads.

[@LaserFur]

another way to get the impedance of that shielded ribbon cable is to make a PCB for each end that converts it into two regular ribbon cables. This is similar to how IDE was changed.

[@nysaea]

uiiii this is fantastic to see!!! I'm glad to see it being into good hands now, I'm sure Valo will do a great job spreading the love for these pieces of history! :3

[@AppliedCryogenics]

Im exited to see what transfer protocol you're gonna use! Kermit? XMODEM? Raw? S-Record? I'm on the edge of my seat! PS: Ahhh. Kinda similar to XMODEM. Kinda. Cool!

[@captainchaos3667]

This stuff is amazing. It's like an adventure movie or something. Like you're on an epic quest. 😄

[@phildxyz]

This so reminds me of the hoops I had to jump through on my first job working with DG Nova 2's and 3's...

[@Trollge-1119]

this is a most coolest thing i ever seen in this video and for my context i do like design how its made

[@AntoineWG]

The cotter pin that locks the Hawk heads in place throws me for a loop every time. Then again, the 1983 Pioneer LaserDisc player in my arcade cabinet has a shipping screw, and they're only a few years apart.

[@happysprollie]

Another great video. As an aside, it cracks me up that yoou always refer to the Butler Tech guy as 'Mr Hall', like you're still at school (and like Jesse referring to 'Mr White' in Breaking Bad). But then I'm easily amused.

[@KeritechElectronics]

Sounds utterly complicated, but definitely some clever hacking went into it! I'm impressed with your clear and thorough explanation. You're certainly making CuriousMarc proud! I love seeing you get this thing going. You're making the world a better place - at least for us, the old tech aficionados.

[@gregf9160]

Yay! The beard is coming back 😀 Hurrah 🥳

[@AddieDirectsTV]

27:10 cats and dogs being friends?! Whaaaaaaat?!

[@kpanic23]

Mass hysteria! Human sacrifice!

[@MarcelHuguenin]

Epic video, thank you David!

[@johnvanwinkle4351]

Great job David! Success again….😂

[@JamesTK]

The dog and the cat at the end ❤

[@TheHylianBatman]

FORTRAN APPEARANCE!!! I love FORTRAN! Whoo-hoo! Now I wonder if the CPU-5 will ever go back into it? Also, I wonder if you actually threw away that ribbon cable? I wonder if it would be useful for something if you just pared away the bad connections. You never know what you might need it for!

[@steenhansen8]

Omg, what a rescue mission !!

[@VanceStrickland]

One of the steps the high school will need is a way to do backup/restore for that system. Maybe a fancier serial backup/restore to a laptop? (Though that could take FOREVER - and it wouldn't accommodate incrementals). Just thinking about how (now that it's working) to KEEP it working for them.

[@wtmayhew]

I was thinking of the idea of hiding a modern cheat inside the hawk drive. Something like a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 could hide inside the hawk chassis to intercept the commands to read and write data from a virtual drive on an SD card. The interface speed slow enough and with only 5 megabytes per platter, a Pi could probably generate the serial data in real time to feed to the controller card in the Centurion backplane. DEC PDP users have Qbone and UNIbone cards which can be plugged into the respective backplanes to emulate,all,sorts of drives snd peripherals. The difference is there are still a lot of PDP systems around, some still in production, while there are only a handful of Centurions in the world. An emulator to live inside the Hawk drive is probably an economic possibility because many different systems, including DEC systems, had Hawk drives. Old hardware can be left spinning and seeking to give the air of realism while the emulator handles storing and transferring bits.

[@Metaln00b]

Your videos are so interesting. Thank you

[@highpath4776]

There will be a lot of "calendars" printed on that printer if it gets running. mind you get the centurion stuck down nicely on the monitor and does one of the switch buttons on the desk system need pushing in. IF more drives added later can the opsys be modified to those and will the mystery of system program hanging when "hardward not found" happened as it should have ignored that (I assume one byte is wrong somewhere)

[@BrunoRegno]

Valo! Great going dude!

[@ppokorny99]

The xmodem or xmodem1k protocol might have been a worthwhile protocol to implement so you could use it for more data transfers later

[@wtmayhew]

I have a lot of respect for xmodem for saving the bacon many times. It seems like almost anything under the sun had an xmodem implementation and the simplicity of xmodem makes it reliable snd tolerant of configurations where flow control signals can’t be counted on. Xmodem has let me get files off of ailing PCs and resurrect scrambled Cisco routers more times than I can count.

[@JohnSmith-xq1pz]

"Alive! Alive!" *thunderclap*

[@edgeeffect]

It's funny how you've gone from being a guy with an old mini computer to, possibly, the world's Centurion expert. :)

[@savadimitrijevic4668]

I love those disk drives, I have a hawk too

[@cheeseparis1]

This was so great, thanks

[@rolfdieterklein]

fantastic work

[@MajenkoTechnologies]

That looks very much like the motherboard in my dual Xeon Dell workstation

[@danielmkubacki]

Great job!

[@e7yu]

So cool, a update.👍

[@rickhole]

Well done.

[@RichardBetel]

Adafruit makes a board that lets you interface a microcontroller to a floppy drive… I feel like we need to make something similar for the hawk drive. You should have been able to reimage the drive over USB from the laptop in about 30 minutes.

[@SimonBauer7]

yeah, they make usb to sata, usb to ide adapters, so why not make one from usb to hawk?

[@alexkuhn5078]

13:40 B1FF B0FF B0FF ...there's just something inherently funny about hex

[@markpitts5194]

BABE

[@josephkarl2061]

ABBA

[@PlayerClarinet]

d00d: b00b1e5!

[@alexkuhn5078]

@@markpitts5194 CAFE BABE

[@slabrankle9588]

I've been dying for a new Centurion video! Say, are you planning to use those more common HP style heads to restore all of the drives eventually?

[@Map71Vette]

The desk drawer format is actually pretty cool for a computer. Kind of surprised that isn't still a thing, unless it is and I just have no idea.

[@LmgWarThunder]

There's desk format. A lot less useful but basically ours the PC in the slab you write and type on

[@SimonBauer7]

you can build whatever you want, there are desk pcs people diy, atx is all standardized. or just hang a normal tower under a desk, they make mounts for this.

[@waterratmke8330]

Usagi Electric: I understand you are looking for Hawk drives. I have two mothballed. How do I reach you to discuss details? Thank you.

[@UsagiElectric]

The best way to get in touch with me is through Discord! discord.gg/p7UsfHD

[@fabianfarina2208]

Rizz that machine spirit Valo!!!

[@RobSchofield]

@ 15:22 - shame there isn't a C compiler for this beastie - then you could compile a version of Kermit for transfer without needing these hi-jinks. The used to be an assembly-only version of the Kermit source floating around (several, actually - processor specific) but finding and then converting to this assembler might be "fun". Is there a processor architecture definition for this machine , or even an assembly language reference manual?

[@RobSchofield]

Found the Wiki on GH.

[@robot797]

good job dude!!!

[@SeekingTheLoveThatGodMeans7648]

awww the cat and the dog

[@blueshells50]

would it be possible to emulate the drive with something like a compact flash drive obviously the board and ribbons would need to be custom made to doit. but it would be a nice way to preserve these systems without risking another failure of the drives

[@JanBruunAndersen]

Time to implement a X/Y/Zmodem receiver & sender for the Centurion instead of relying on a home grown protocol.

[@ricardog2165]

I liked the Kermit app back in the day.

[@JanBruunAndersen]

@ricardog2165 - I remember Kermit being quite big.

[@calicantdrive]

You missed an opportunity... could've made the header HawkTuah.

[@Nebulous6]

I'm sure the second you got it running, your rabbit walked over to it and rubbed his chin on it. "This is mmmmmine now."

[@s.kammerer1206]

Hi! what emulator do you use for Centurion system? I find it very interesting! How does one get started on using the emulator?

[@joshjones3408]

Thats kinda like pulling the keys out going down the road why the car us hot an running.... an hoping when you put your back up key in the car starts back up at 70 with no problem....i like it 👍👍👍👍

[@jakobfindlay4136]

At this rate I'm surprised you haven't gotten a unibone or similar device to emulate parts of the system for testing

[@KameraShy]

Having gone through decades of working with computers, figuring them out and getting them to work always involves trial-and-error. A lot of it. You never have the right documentation when you need it.

[@timothyt.82]

On a tangent, do you think that any data transfer within a bit per second range is called baud because the transfer type was popularized by modulating audio tones over the telephone network? Bits over Audio? B Aud?

[@sjsoftware72]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code

[@timothyt.82]

@sjsoftware72 oh wow! That's actually a cool piece of history. Thanks for sharing!

[@slincolne]

'Hot Plug' : An IT term that refers to when you are either working on someone else's computer or a system that is an obvious basket case :-)