Zilog Zeus

[Jules Richardson]

Jacob Dahl Pind wrote:
> 
> 
> On Thu, 8 May 2008, Mark Davidson wrote:
> 
>> NCR Tower... yes, I used to work for a company that had several of 
>> those for
>> running RM/COBOL.  Interesting little machines.  I *think* they also 
>> had a
>> special OS just for RM work.  I haven't seen one of these in a long time.
>>
> I got a ncr tower32 some time ago from a friend, was my intention to 
> make a backup of its hardrives

What model? Although my model 700 is likely staying back in England (too heavy 
to ship, unfortunately), I think I might have backups of the hard drives here 
with me in the US and can have a look if needed. They're raw 'dd' dumps, but I 
expect they'll work to an identical-or-larger drive.

> sadly the psu survied only one powering 
> up, and given my limited space for storage I decied to pull all cards, 
> backplates and hardrives from it, hope one day maybe to figure out what 
> the pinout for the psu was and try to powering the whole lot up again.

I did once figure out the pinout for one of the 600 models for someone as 
theirs had a broken PSU - I'll have a look to see if I still have it. It might 
be model-specific though; I know that PSU was different to the one in my 700.

> If anything else fails at the very least try to get the harddrives 
> dumped, still searching for a mfm controler for that job though, Have a 
> 2090 mfm card for my amiga systmes, but I havent been able to make that 
> talk to those 200mb mfm drives the ncr used.

Oh. That'll teach me to reply before reading the whole message :-) Sounds like 
yours was a 4xx/5xx/6xx then, not a 7xx/8xx (which were SCSI).

Note that the data on the 700's disks was byte-swapped (i.e. "foobar" appears 
as "ofbora"), so it needed converting before modern software (Linux in my 
case) would make sense of it - your disk contents may well be the same. I 
can't remember now if Linux supported NCR's partition layout right off, or if 
I had to hack that.

cheers

Jules