Hi Guys,
Picked up a Next Slab yesterday ... complete with a couple
boxed versions of NextStep.
Got it to boot up - It was configured to prompt for a
username and password - which of course I didn't have.
I managed to restart it into single-user mode, and used
"passwd root" to change the root password. I also looked
at /etc/passwd and noted that "me" didn't have a password
(blank field). I did confirm that after "passwd root" the
encrypted string in /etc/passwd was changed.
On restarting in multi-user mode, I was still unable to
login to the graphical interface - neither "root" with
the password I had set, or "me" with no password would
work.
Restarted in single-user mode - this time I dug around on
the net and found information to use "nu -m" to set the
password.
I reset the root password (again), and also reset the
"me" password to a null string. Looking at /etc/passwd
I noted that the password field for "me" was no longer
blank but now has an encrypted field (isn't no password
supposed to be represented by a blank field).
Now the system boots up in multiuser mode and automatically
logs in as "me" - so I got to play with NextStep which is
kindof interesting (mouse is painfully slow however).
Ideally, I'd like to have it prompt for login name so that
I could login as either root or me - anyone know:
- How to configure it back to having a login screen
- Wny I couldn't login as "root" at the graphical
interface after I had just set the password (and yes,
I checked that the password was entered correctly)
Thanks,
Dave
--
dave06a (at) Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com
com Collector of vintage computing equipment:
http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.html
Today I received an email from a gentleman in possession of an AT&T
PC6300, wanting to know if I wanted it for the cost of shipping. I'm
not interested in collecting PCs, so I said I'd pass it on to the list.
Here is his description of the machine:
(start of quote)
As the original purchaser, I am seeking a new home for a pristine 1985
Personal Computer with peripherals, software, and original
documentation. All were functioning perfectly in February 1998, when
replaced and stored.
All items are in their original boxes:
AT&T PC6300 with 256KB RAM and two 5-1/4" floppy drives, Color Monitor,
Keyboard, Mouse, and Citizen MSP-15 dot matrix printer with 8-1/2x11 and
11x15 tractor feed paper.
As you know, this PC was the state of the art technology in 1985 and the
best and fastest of the pre-"Windows" operating system platforms. It is
an excellent representation depicting the end of the Dot Matrix and DOS
eras.
(end of quote)
If you are interested, please mail me off-list at frustum at pacbell.net.
I'll forward his contact information to you (I'd put it here, but some
people reasonably don't like having their personal information stuck in
a public forum archive).
Thanks.
>Date: Wed, 5 Sep 2007 15:55:04 -0500
>From: Mark Tapley <mtapley at swri.edu>
>Subject: Re: D-shell sizes
>To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
>Message-ID: <p06240819c304c5a417d4(a)[129.162.152.69]>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed"
>
><Hangs head in shame>
>
>I am *so* sorry - I left off the correct letter (thought it was "B",
>just wasn't sure) in hopes of *avoiding* kicking off the annual
>D-shell connector nomenclature thread.
>
>Have we dug up the horse bones, beat them into flour, baked the flour
>into bread, and punched it down enough now?
>
>Guess not. I'll add to the mess:
<chuckle> Going back to your earlier topic, so I really should nest
another "Was:" up there. :-)
Jim's old Mac had the same kind of SCSI connector. You probably
never looked closely at it at an early Geekathon. Or maybe he only
brought it to the first one and brought the Outbound the next few
years.
Anyway, the upgrades for the 128K and 512K[E] models which provided a
SCSI port, typically routed the ribbon cable around the edge of the
battery compartment. A few ran the cable over the floppy connector.
The more elegant ones actually provided a replacement battery
compartment cover which had the DB25 connector (awww, back to the
topic) mounted in the plastic cover. One removed the old battery
compartment cover, routed the SCSI ribbon cable out of the case
around the edge of the battery compartment and secured the new cover
over the battery compartment, which gave one a DB25 connector mounted
over the battery compartment.
There were several SCSI upgrades for those old machines. The
SCSI-only upgrades usually plugged into the ROM sockets, provided
sockets on top of the upgrade daughter board for the two ROM chips
and then bore a 53C80 and ribbon header. There might have been a
bit more logic, but not much. IIRC, they did require that the host
machine be upgraded to the later 512KE or Plus ROMs because the
original 128K and 512K ROMs did not contain a SCSI port driver.
Other upgrades provided additional memory as well and those typically
required tapping all the CPU lines, so they either used a Killy Clip
(clear plastic receptacle with embedded pins which fits snuggly over
the 68000 DIP) which provided a double row of pins above the clip in
the standard 64 pin DIP spacing, or they relied on headers soldered
directly to the 68000 pins.
My favorite was the NewLife brand upgrades because they provided
eight SIMM sockets on the daughter board. If one had a 512KE, one
could install the NewLife upgrade and add a SCSI port and eight SIMM
sockets. Then two 1MB SIMMs and six 256KB SIMMs later, one had a
4MB (maximum) RAM equipped Mac Plus equivalent, which was supposedly
somewhat faster for reasons I never really understood. The CPU ran
at the same speed, but the Newlife guys claimed some part of their
interface to the peripheral logic or maybe to the RAM was faster.
The advantage of that memory arrangement was that back at that time
(early 90s) 1 MB SIMMs were still close to $100 each, but 256KB SIMMs
cost between free and $5, or $10 if one totally failed one's merchant
skill.
Jeff Walther
Back on August 25th, I wrote of a possible group buy of adapters to
take a laptop IDE disk and use it in a machine expecting a laptop SCSI
disk. One person (you know who you are, and thank you very much) wrote
to one of these lists and named a vendor that carried them as of a day
or two earlier (the post said something like "I just ordered a few
more"); interestingly enough, it was the very vendor who had denied all
knowledge of them on the phone to me: MCE Technologies, LLC,
mcetech.com, +1 949 458 0800, or, in the NANPA, 1-800-500-0622. (I
can't speak to the validity of the 949-458-0800 number; I used the
800-500-0622 number when calling as outlined below.)
However, this post also named an MCE Tech part number for them
("sta-idescsi25", and indeed the invoice copy packed with the devices
says "STA-IDESCSI25" in the "Item No." column). So I called them
again, and, not letting on I'd called before, asked about them by that
number. They said they had some in stock, so I ordered two. They
arrived today, and as far as I can tell are exactly what I wanted: I
have a Toshiba laptop IDE drive of slightly over 4G in my Voyager right
now using one of them.
I did hear from some people wanting into the group buy. MCE said on
the phone that they ship worldwide (they use FedEx, or at least they
did for me), and their price of (US)$20 is enough below the $65 I was
expecting to pay that I daresay anyone who was willing to join the
group buy can just order directly and still come out ahead. (Usual
disclaimers apply - I have no relationship with them other than that of
customer with supplier, etc.)
They did get one thing wrong: they asked whether I'd rather have
express or ground shipping, and I'm quite sure I said ground, but they
shipped express anyway. The extra cost was a little annoying, but
still got me two of them for about what I was expecting to pay for one,
so I'm not kicking - but anyone who wants non-express shipping might
want to be fairly emphatic about it.
(As before, I'm setting a reply-to to a bitbucket; please fix up your
to-line if you're replying, to point to the list or person to whom you
intend to reply.)
/~\ The ASCII der Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca
/ \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
> I was going to ask about Irish machines and see that James got there
> first; did Ireland ever make any micros?
Several multinationals had or have a presence in Ireland including:
Amdahl
Apple
Dell
Digital
EMC
Fujitsu Siemens
Gateway
HP
IBM
Memorex
Many of these built computers or peripherals here for the European market.
However, it is pretty much the same as equipment thats found everywhere else
in the world. I am not aware of anything that could be regarded as being
uniquely Irish in the same way that for example Acorn kit could be regarded
as being British.
Intel also have a large manufacturing presence here as have/had Analog Devices
and Motorola (although I think Motorolas operation here was more involved in
mobile phones) so unfortunately we're responsible for the production of lots
of x86 type microprocessors. I hope none of them were designed here,
especially the ones that couldn't divide accurately :-)
>
>Many an Apple was made in their factory in Cork.
>
I was disappointed to find that my Mac SE from Cork doesn't have any
signatures inside the case so I guess they didn't copy the case moulds used in
the US.
Regards,
Peter.
<Hangs head in shame>
I am *so* sorry - I left off the correct letter (thought it was "B",
just wasn't sure) in hopes of *avoiding* kicking off the annual
D-shell connector nomenclature thread.
Have we dug up the horse bones, beat them into flour, baked the flour
into bread, and punched it down enough now?
Guess not. I'll add to the mess:
At 13:54 -0500 9/5/07, der Mouse wrote:
>I have a machine somewhere that uses 3W3 - basically, 13W3 without the
>ten individual pins, and the shell shrunk correspondingly, to about DA
>size (it's at home and I'm not, so I can't be precise about the shell
>size).
My DEC VAX4000VLC uses a connector that sounds just like that for video output.
<Sigh>
--
- Mark, 210-379-4635
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Large Asteroids headed toward planets
inhabited by beings that don't have
technology adequate to stop them:
Think of it as Evolution in Fast-Forward.
> I am *so* sorry - I left off the correct letter (thought it was "B",
> just wasn't sure) in hopes of *avoiding* kicking off the annual
> D-shell connector nomenclature thread.
Thats OK. I forgive you. So far, over the years NOBODY has managed to
give the proper nomenclature. I suggest anyone interested should look
up the mil standard. It tells all.
--
Will, who has nothing more to add to this annual time waster.
> There's a set of those at a downtown bookstore
The entire set was distributed as PDF's on a CD. I wouldn't bother
with the dead tree version. There was also an overview volume added
in the later versions.
and
> MPW (Macintosh Programmer's Workshop?) hasn't been mentioned yet;
> that was the Apple-supported environment, but rarely held up as a
> standard of usability.
We used it for all system development 'til the switch to OSX. Think of
what the Mac would have been with a command line interface, and you have
MPW. Code management (projector) was OK, but had some nasty constraints
when building big projects.
The big problem with all the 68K programming environments for the Mac is
A5 relative addressing, creating a segmented 64K environment on a machine
that originally had a flat address space. That was the big thing we changed
on PPC machines.
I haven't yet laid my hands on them, idiot eBay
vendors keep using my stored address instead of
sending it where I tell them, but I have a couple of
these. Info seems a little hard to find. Used an
80c186 so arguably they're on topic.
____________________________________________________________________________________
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I suppose I could just drive and save myself the
headaches. And looking at some of these websites and
just trying to find a freaking schedule, aside from
the crap about scheduled getaways and WHATEVER THE
FRIG, can someone tell me (who's done it) if it's
practical to get to Boston from NYC by train? Amtrak
is just to expensive (~120$ round trip). I doubt
sincerely that anyone on this list would have done
this, so I guess I'll be driving. I hear Massachusetts
people have lost the ability (as if they ever had it)
to drive...
Metro north only goes as far as Waterbury, CT, so I
guess you get off there and start thumbing???
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