NCR mini tower looking for info ???

[Jules Richardson]

g-wright at att.net wrote:
> Hi, 
> 
> I have a couple of these and need  some information.
> These are NCR mini tower servers  with a 68000 cpu.

I've not heard them called "mini" before, but I think the regular Tower 400 
was a 68000 machine with ST412 disk interface (the 'MSC' board) and a HPSIO-8 
board for serial.

I've got a 700 model - '030 CPU, ECC memory, dual HPSIO-16 boards, Ethernet, 
HPMSC SCSI controller, system standby/suspend etc.  They're not blindingly 
fast (Ethernet response is *really* sluggish), but they're nice enough 
machines in a "real computer" kind of way.

> a Qic type Cartridge tape and comm  board with 8 TTY ports
> (all 15 pin) and 2 CPU ports (1 DB9 and 1 DB15). 

The DB15 is the console. The DB9 is for a remote diagnostic modem link (I'm 
not sure whether you can get a fully-functional console up on it, and I think 
it's stuck at 2400 baud)

> The manuals don't say anything about the console port or
> pin outs. 

Console pinouts:

1	TxD	out
2	RTS	out
3	DSR	in
4	DTR	out
9	RxD	in
10	CTS	in
11	sig gnd
12	DCD	in

Hazy memory says that it might expect 9600 baud, 7E1 by default. I might have 
the jumper settings for the serial board that you have - I can take a look if 
you want.

I think the regular terminal lines might use the same pinouts on your machine 
(my 700 has 37-way connectors with four ports over each connector).

> So does anyone have a boot tape

Afraid not... I'd like to hear from anyone who has them too. I've got raw 
drive image backups of my machine, but it'd be nice to know that the install 
media was out there. I think there are two flavours of boot tape 
(unfortunately for me) - one that'll work with 400-6x0 machines, and one 
that's specific to the 700 (I've not sure about the 750 and 800).

Note the if you have a BNC connector toward the bottom of the machine at the 
back, it's something to do with the power fail detection circuitry. It's not a 
Ethernet network connector and plugging it into one would result in 
interesting things happening :-)

cheers

Jules