I stopped by at the only used bookstore in downtown Pittsburgh last
week. It appears that the place is getting ready to fold, as they've
got everything on sale at ridiculously low prices, and there is a
big "BUILDING FOR SALE" sign in the front window....
Since they've started liquidating, they've been letting people up on to
their second floor, which was always their storage and "we'll never be
able to sell this stuff..." area, and was always off-limits to customers
in the past. In adventuring around up there, I found two copies of the
Varian 620/F Reference Handbook, dated November 1970. This isn't really
in my area of interest, but at $1.00/each, I couldn't resist, and I
figured that there might be people here who would like them.
Both copies are in reasonably good shape, though both have suffered
a bit from being stored in a bad environment (this shop's storage floor
is open to the sky in a couple of places - probably one reason they
never wanted to let customers up there....). One has a small tear
in the cover.
If you want one of these, it's yours for the cost of shipping. Limit
of one per customer. First two responses get 'em.
--Pat.
It's kind of an odd thing, but does anyone have a Symmetric 375 box that they
want to pass to a good home. I remember wanting one badly when they were new
and my memory was just jogged by seeing one at VCF.
(It's a small 32016 based box running more or less BSD 4.2. Something with
personality. Gosh I miss my Symbolics 3620...different of course, but
certainly unique.)
Many thanks in advance,
Jeff Katcher
jmkatcher(a)yahoo.com
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Hi,
Dusting off my old Diamond system the other day got me thinking about trying to
resurrect my Phillips P3800 (some sort of multi-user CP/M platform, early 80's
I believe). It's another garage resident that I acquired a few years ago and
then never had time to restore.
It had been the victim of a basement flood when I got it and was dead as a dodo
- plus the hard drive had roasted itself (I believe when the previous owner
turned it on when it was still soaking wet, which is always such a very good
idea...)
I'm going from memory here, but believe that the hard drive is an ST225 - and
the main logic board on the base of the unit was pretty well charred. What I
did was find an identical model working drive and use its logic board with the
frame and platters from the drive in the Phillips unit. Am I wasting my time
even trying that? Or, assuming the data is intact on the platters still and
survived the flooding, might I get a usuable drive by trying that? Maybe the
logic boards are calibrated against some of the mechanical components within
the drive for all I know.
When I tried this the drive would at least then spin up (using a standard PC
power supply for testing), but without fixing the power supply in the Philips
and figuring out how to connect something to it (there's a whole pile of cables
hanging out the back, to one of which presumably some sort of console connects)
I don't yet know if I can actually read any data off it.
Unfortunately I have no manuals for the unit, no system disks, no idea of the
cabling, a possibly-dead hard drive, and a definitely-dead power supply. I'm
also missing a tape drive for it (previous owner wanted to keep that) but
hopefully it'll run without it. Never found anyone else who has heard of one of
these, let alone owns one. On the plus side, the case is a nice shade of beige
;-)
cheers
Jules
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> But for those who've never heard
> of it, let me provide a few details.
thanks there to my sales agent... (ha ha, only kidding :)
> The logic circuitry is on a lot of fairly small plug-in cards in a
> cardcage inside. CPU, memory, 3 or 4 for the display, ditto for the
> floppy controller, and a couple of interface cards for the keyboard and
> printer. Or something like that anyway. There are no custom chips in
> there that I am aware of.
I pulled a few cards the other day when I took that photo of the insides - I
was a little out on my dates; earliest copyright date I can see is 1977 and the
last manufacturing date on any chip was sometime in 1979.
card list sounds about right without wheeling the machine out of storage again,
and no I didn't see any custom chips in my machine either. Think there are only
two boards for the display, joined both on the backplane and the outer edge.
Then CPU, memory, RTC, keyboard, drives x2, printer, and an unknown board (see
below)
> The printer (at least on mine) is a Hitype II. With that strange 50 pin
> interface (separate control lines for selecting a character, deciding how
> far to advance the carriage/paper, and so on).
curious. Mine's definitely a Diablo unit and plugs into its own card within the
cardcage in the system unit. But there's also a seperate card in there (oddly,
marked as Diablo!) with a large connector on the outer edge (2 rows of pins,
non-staggered) with nothing plugged into it. I have no idea what that's for -
that connector looks purposeful though. There's not a huge amount of logic
inside this thing so I suppose figuring out a circuit diagram wouldn't be too
difficult and maybe then its function would be revealed.
oh, and it's a 'proper' machine, in that it has wheels on the bottom ;-)
cheers
Jules
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>From: "Eric Smith" <eric(a)brouhaha.com>
>
>> I can't find it online anymore, but about two years ago I stumbled
>> across this fascinating article which discussed the demise of
>> Micropolis, presenting it as a case study of business fraud.
>>
>> My favorite highlight had to do with Micropolis claiming much larger
>> inventories of hard drives than they actually had. This was to make the
>> company look as if it were more valuable. This excess inventory was
>> primarily made up of a special class of hard drive, which in the company
>> records were listed as "very hard drives". In reality they were bricks
>> that had been boxed in Micropolis packaging.
>
>Micropolis had their own problems, but I don't think we should accuse
>them with out-and-out fraud without researching it a bit further.
>The company that shipped bricks was Miniscribe, and one of their
>executives was finally convicted when it was discovered that he'd
>actually purchased the bricks on his credit card. (Note to self:
>when buying materials for an inventory scam, pay cash.)
>
>I very much doubt that any company records used the phrase "very hard
>drives", since that wasn't brought up by the prosecution in the trial.
>Sounds more like a clever phrase a reporter came up with.
>
>> Apparently a few of them were even shipped to customers.
>
>The true story may never be known, but I don't think any shipped to
>customers that weren't aware of the plan. Some customers may have
>agreed to help Miniscribe with their inventory problems (as in lack
>of), because the customer may have been more interested in the promise
>of a real drive delivered later than the company going out of business
>sooner.
>
>One of the surplus stores in the Denver area had a brick in their
>display case with their disk drives; the brink had a sign saying
>"Miniscribe 40MB". However, it was not an *actual* Miniscribe brick.
>
>Miniscribe was acquired by Maxtor and was known for a time as "Maxtor
>Colorado".
>
>The only complaint I had with Micropolis was that their drives had a
>very high failure rate.
Hi
At the last company I was at, we never had one ( Micropolis )
complete a 1 week burnin ( at room temp ), until they fiddled with
something and the rate dropped to only about 3 out of ten
per week. I knew we were making a mistake, at the begining
when they said that they would give us free engineering
time to help use get their drives to work on our machines.
I stated such to management but was ignored.
Dwight
The older SGI 4D twin towers (professional series) used a SCSI bus
that was routed through a connector arrangement up through the
smaller drive tower. Unfortunately, I seem to remember that
because of the stub length off of these connectors, it violated
the SCSI specs pretty badly. My guess is that because the early
CPU cards that were fitted in these systems (IP4 and IP4.5) only
supported async. scsi, they were more forgiving than a sync. system
would be. BTW, I believe that one of the reasons for using ESDI vs.
SCSI in these critters was that, at the time, the ESDI drive/controller
combo was quite a bit faster than async. SCSI. They intended the
SCSI interface for peripheral access only...
That said, I did manage to get a SCSI drive working in one, but
since I had the ESDI controller and drives, it didn't seem worth
it at the time to pursue it further...
As far as the twin tower power series, my memory fails me... I don't
remember when they began supporting sync. SCSI, but my guess is
that it began with the power-series CPU boards.
-al-
-acorda(a)1bigred.com
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tothwolf [mailto:tothwolf@concentric.net]
> Sent: Monday, October 28, 2002 2:16 PM
> To: cctalk(a)classiccmp.org
> Subject: Re: Fw: 4D 220 VGX: free for Shipping or Orlando,FL pickup
>
>
> On Mon, 28 Oct 2002, Will Jennings wrote:
>
> > Eh? How are they SCSI? I had one of these once, the drive
> in it was most
> > definetly a Hitachi ESDI disk... They're such cool looking machines,
> > too...
>
> If the system is a dual tower configuration, it almost always
> uses ESDI
> drives, but the single tower deskside 'cubes' always have a
> SCSI bus in
> them. AFAIK, the dual tower was retired around the time of
> the 2x0, so I
> guess it could indeed use ESDI drives. I have yet to have
> seen a 2x0 in a
> dual tower, but I suppose they might exist. A photo of the
> system itself
> would pretty much clear it up.
>
> The cpu boards in these are actually interchangeable for the
> most part,
> and the deskside chassis can accept up to two such boards
> with up to two
> cpus each for a total of 4 processors. The predator rack
> chassis support
> up to 4 cpu boards for a total of 8 cpus.
>
> -Toth
>
Hi,
It may sound a bit offtopic, but it's near the 10yrs margin :-)
I have an external 28.8 Supra FAX modem, the one with the 2 digit green LED display. It's never flashed, and contains one of the very early firmware versions. I recall that Supra had an extensive file list (including manuals in PDFs) for downloading at supra's site, then moved to Diamond, then nothing, they vanished.
Could anybody help me locate a mirror of these files? I need the flash files to upgrade it up to 33.6 version (needs several consecutive flashes) and the AT command set that supported (the non standard commands).
Cheers
George
This could be right, because clearly "EDUcational COMPuter Corporation" could be shortened to "EduComp". EduComp was in the Hartford, Connecticut area in the mid-70's at least.
EduComp morphed into QuoData, and QuoData morphed in Jenzabar.
There is still a Quodata.com web site.
When I dealt with EduComp they resold DEC 8's and 11's to schools along with some of their own software, plus co-developed ETOS on the 8's
