Zilog Zeus

[Jacob Dahl Pind]

On Fri, 9 May 2008, Jules Richardson wrote:

> 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.

a tower32 model 3460, think what is a 600 type.

>> 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.

Would be very helpfull, would save me having to trace the power lines on 
the boards.

>> 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).

The controler card has a MFM controler, with room for two data cables and 
two control onces and a single scsi connector, the scsi connector was only 
used for a archive corp interface board that does scsi to qic-02 interface 
from what I have been able to dig up.

> 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.

If just I can get one of my mfm cards be it the 2090 in my amiga 3000 or 
the noname lcs one to work with the drives so I can get dd image of them, 
I can always worry about how to make sense of the data later. 
Is a good excuise work with my amigas again, havent used them in a while 
even though they are sitting on my deck right in front of me.

regards Jacob Dahl Pind