Gateway Electronics

 

This is from a reddit user u/razzmataz a recollection on the r/StLouis reddit group

Do any of the old timers here know or can confirm if Gateway had some sort of connection to EPO down in Houston, Texas? I'm vaguely remembering a conversation with one of the old guys when they were on Page that they originally owned EPO years ago, but I'm old now and don't completely remember...

My recollection:

I've been going to Gateway since it was on Delmar. My cousin took me there when I was ** in 1960 when it opened.

It was founded by Stu Barfeld (may have spelling wrong) and was taken over by his daughter when he passed away.

They moved to Vinita park by my same cousin's house which lead to a lot of my allowance going to Stu.

When I was in college and later, I'd come back to the area for a christmas party, and they always remembered me.

AFIK I don't think anyone but Stu was involved. He opened a pretty good scrap operation in Denver and later in San Diego. I got to the San Diego one a few times. (I'm in Orange County, CA). Lots of stuff, but not quite the family vibe as STL. Nice guys though.

I don't know the guy who worked the counter's name but I think he's been there since early on in when it was in Vinita Park. I hope he does well after this. And Stu's daughter, too.

I never heard of any Texas operation if that answers your question.

u/Robify:

Late to the party. And what a party it was...

I didn't even know that the store existed in San Diego until one day I saw an ad for a counter guy. I believe Lisa said,"I had to hire you. When you walked in here, you got all squirelly-eyed." That's probably the best way to describe it when you first walk in. I'm not going to bore you with any description of it; essentially, the one in San Diego was a fair copy of the original. Definitely the same vibe. How could it not be?

So when I got head-hunted for a tech job in Phoenix I was pretty bummed out by the lack of 'stroll and feel' electronic stores. But then a buddy of mine -who's really quite a tech- off-handly mentioned a place called Apache Rclamation. On a run-down and isolated three block stretch of Apache Boulevard West of the airport,, it had all the feel of good old Gateway, except that the gentleman behind the counter didn't have squirrely eyes.

Addendum; I worked at the San Diego Gateway Electronics for a little over the entire 2001 calendar year. I will never forget it.

--30--

index of personal google photos subjects

 

same as red van jul 27 2020

social security id info jun 25 2020

tiger tail 6 23 2020

varian 620 1 oct 2019

7000 scope sept 12 2019 

7000 rack scop sept 12 2019

everest unit photos sept 10 2019

5061 photo aug 14 2019

imsai replica panel aug 5 2019

mmd photo aug 2 2019

manual donation to chm 7/29/2019

5061 photo jul 9 2019

norton surplus 6 28 2019

car jun 22 2019

ed pile jun 10 2019

austron jun 4 2019

sherman survey may 6 2019

logbook apr 23 2019  joseph scianna log book vpb 208

circular slide rule instructions apr 22 2019

11 70 fp feb 11 2019

shirley hair feb 9 2019

vt 103 dec 21 2018

unibone dec 18 2018

robbies graduation dec 7 2018

cruise end oct 27 2018

cruise begin oct 21 2018

storage west oct 1 2018

huntington / cindy stephens jul 21 2018

trip for jim sharp end jul 17 2018

sneads jul 13 2018

house jul 13 2018

storage kc jul 13 2018

left on trip jul 8 2018

John's SC build mar 24 2018

argo system dec 2 2017

1134 system dec 2 2017

nashville visit oct 26 2017

silicon salvage sept 25 2017

john pile sept 23 2017

1600 sept 11 2017

sellam sept 11 2017

solar eclipse aug 22 2017

aug 4 2017 ethnology books

jul 20 2017 wire recorder

jul 20 2017 varian 620i

jul 15 2017 varian 620i

jul 7 2017 john house

safe jun 24 2017

john house jun 18 2017

henry the dog may 5 2017

wrightline card punch may 4 2017

glider load slide rule apr 25 2017

gear 360 camera info mar 30 2017

wang card reader dec 17 2016

oae paper tape reader dec 12 2016

Raspberry Pi zero iUNiKER USB Dongle

Works for every raspberry pi zero via pin contacts to create a USB OTG connection to any host the USB connector on the dongle plugs into.

Picks off the power and USB signal lines as appropriate to attach one of the USB ports to the host as OTG.

in boot partition

in cmdline.txt add

modules-load=dwc2,g_ether after "rootwait"

create ssh in the same folder

add wifi supplicant as needed.

connect USB to Raspberry pi as OTG recipe
https://desertbot.io/blog/ssh-into-pi-zero-over-usb

--30--

Micro 5 brief history

Micro 5 was founded 

Computer world link

Trademark reference 1984

Trademark Lookup (TESS)

Micro Five trademark (TESS)  actual trademark for computer corp.

Trademark first used 1981, canceled 1991

Micro 5 trademark (TESS)  transferred and re-registered to another company

Digital Design Aug 81  Micro Five V-2000 terminal (pdf page 51) 

Novell sues US Customs Service

  1991 Samsung was importing systems as Micro Five.  judgement filed 1997

286 LOADALL

AST research LOADALL

History (as I can recall)

Micro Five was founded (probably around 81) with Cliff Myers president,

staff including Alan Gauthrup, Dick Brown, Mike Bryga and Phil Mahru.

Phil and some of the others would later constitute the core Phoenix Bios

Irvine, Ca staff, and their start was here.

They came out with an 8086 multi user system with home grown software.

When the AT was announced they decided to make a clone.

Though nothing to do with Micro Five other than guys knew it was around

an XT sized board which would take copied 286 bios was developed in

Santa Ana, and was owned by a Taiwan corporation. 

They wanted a clean  room BIOS with hopefully no grounds to have to

worry about being sued by IBM.  They did develop their own bios and

a few other drivers, as they had the expanded memory.  Their design

for that wasn't IBM compatible, so they did their own memory driver.

Their product didn't take off as they were overrun by a host of such

systems.  But their systems turned out to be nice for system integrators

who needed more slots.  Eventually they came out with I think a 12 or

more slot product.  

They also I think had a 386 system as well. Eventually the server

product was the main product that was popular, and it was popular

with Novell server builders.  Samsung was really pushing hard into

that market, but not having the success they desired. 

Samsung acquired Micro 5 and their business and substituted in

Samsung hardware.  I don't recall if they'd started manufacturing it

prior to acquisition.

They ended up breaking up the manufacturing for systems not used

for servers, Server systems and service and eventually suspended

the brand for all intents and services.

FWIW, they also did the same sort of acquisition and eventual

shutdown of AST research, a much bigger system.  The overall

contraction that has left Dell, Lenovo, HP and a few other PC

makers had started, and AST didn't survive.

AST also never made any system liked as well as the original

Micro Five 286 and 386 servers.  They of course were eventually

eclipsed, but in their time there was a pretty sizable business.

As to drivers for the original 286 system, and their extended

memory, at the time there was a driver designed for the Intel

memory for the 286.  Interestingly DOS which was a very

dominant system at the time had a driver to access memory

up to 16mb.

What wasn't publicized was how Microsoft was running what

seemed to be a Real mode OS and accessing memory without

any extended hardware, paging, but seemed to be

accessing it in what was a new mode called protected mode.

That was significant because there was no documented way

to get a 286 back to real mode (1mb only) after you

placed the processor operating in the mode (Protected) to

access the extended memory.

There was no apparent hardware reset, which could

be used to force a return and continue to realmode.

What the Micro Five people had discovered was an undocumented

instruction that could reset the protected mode internal registers

without having to reset. 

A system reset would have been very long, and would have made

operating the peripheral controllers and a host of other

functions pretty difficult.  

But the instruction they independently discovered, and

used but refused to disclose was the Microsoft "LOADALL"

instruction, which Intel had not removed from the processor.

Originally designed to be a test feature, but not for release

it could load all the registers and the extended memory registers

that the 286 used for addressing the 16mb memory space.

A friend, Tom Roden also discovered and published

the functions of LOADALL, which outed the whole  trick, and a lot

of other people quickly incorporated it into their drivers.

--30--

KODI on Android TV fails to start

 

If Kodi on Android TV fails to start reset the cache.  Apparently doesn't reset the links to media, but fixed a problem I had with it.

Go to apps and locate the settings app
Click Apps
Now locate and select KODI
Scroll down to Apps. Now locate KODI and click on it
Click Clear Cache
Open Kodi it will now be fixed

--30--

Raspberry Pi OS (raspios) Headless configuration, SSH, Wifi

https://desertbot.io/blog/headless-raspberry-pi-4-ssh-wifi-setup

touch /Volumes/boot/ssh

vi wpa_supplicant.conf

country=US

ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev

update_config=1

network={

    ssid="NETWORK-NAME"

    psk="NETWORK-PASSWORD"

}

configure xrdp after setup

--30--

nmap network tool usage notes

 nmap notes

nmap -v -sn 192.168.xx.0/24

nmap -sn 192.168.xx.0/24

--30--

broken atomic modeset userspace detected, disabling atomic messages on raspberry pi

Occurs when running headless and no screen resolution set (never had a display attached). 

in  dmesg command log (from kernel)

 pi@pi1: $ sudo raspi-config 

  https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=285823 

 --30--