Nick Glazzard's Eclectic Website


This website is a partial reconstruction of my previous site at www.hccc.org.uk which is no longer operational. For many years (2006 to 2018), that was self hosted on a DEC MicroVAX 3100/95 running VAX/VMS and the WASD web server, but more recently it has been held on a commercial service in the U.K. This is a much reduced version following my decision to give up the hccc.org.uk domain name, mostly because I no longer live in the U.K., so it isn't appropriate anymore.

One of the very few mentions of the previous website that I've ever seen described it as "eclectic", so ... that is it's new name!

Most of the topics here will be on retro-computing (large scale computers rather than micro or home computers) and electronics.

The previous website was not in any way a blog (I'm not sure any blogging software would run under VAX/VMS), and this one will not be either. It is just plain HTML, often with elements that were probably "deprecated" decades ago ... although there will also be quite a bit of glTF based 3D content.

This site is very much under construction. It probably will be for as long as it exists, but it really is early days at the moment. More will be added in the weeks to come. Many of the subjects are pretty esoteric and are likely to be of very limited interest. But you never know - there might be something useful or of interest to you. As everyone knows, there is so much "stuff" out there on the Web. Vast ... overwhelming ... endless ... 😃 There doesn't seem much point in repeating any of it, so only "unusual" things are here, for the most part. More bizarre than unusual in some cases, perhaps! These pages try to stick to technical things of some substance (hopefully).

Last updated: 18-JUN-2024. Update number: 5

Retro-computing

3D visualisation of a CDC Cyber 170-865 machine room

This is a sort of interactive virtual museum exhibit built using Blender, glTF, glTF Transform and Babylon.js. It is intended to be an adjunct to the Nostalgic Computing Center (NCC) fork of DtCyber. It shows a CDC Cyber 170-865 machine room as it might have appeared somewhere in the period 1984 to 1990.

Clicking on the following link will open the visualisation in a new tab: CDC Cyber 170-865 Machine Room 3D interactive visualisation.

For more information on this visualisation and how to interact with it, click here.

Photo-realistic still renderings of the Cyber 170-865 machine room equipment

Some path traced renderings of some of the items in the Cyber machine room can be found by clicking here. These were rendered by Blender from the same models used to create the glTF representations.

Electronics

Repairing a Sony ICF-SW100 Radio
Pre 1997 ones will die of broken ribbon cables. It is inevitable. Repair kits seem to be no longer available. Desperate times call for desperate measures...

This describes a repair done in January 2015 that was successful, but maybe more by luck than judgement. The beast is still working as of mid 2024.

How AC bias really works ... Maybe ...
This is an attempt from 2012 to understand what really makes AC bias magnetic audio recording work as well as it does (which, compared to digital recording, isn't all that well, but it can still be pretty impressive). This involves some basic physics and maths and involves numerical simulation of what might be happening. There are exciting animated GIFs, but the equations don't come out too well. A PDF version can be found here, but you miss out on the racy GIFs. It turns out to be not a simple process and some mysteries remain, at least as far as this attempted explanation goes.

ReVox Stuff

I owned a 1973 ReVox A77 Mk 3 (Dolby version) from 1986 to 2017 and it remains one of my favourite pieces of kit. There are a couple of pages about repairing it here.