Hi folks - I come humbly seeking help in regards to bringing up a strange
and quite rare Tektronix workstation from the late 80s/early 90s. TEXT WALL
WARNING! For the uninitiated, the XD88 was Tek's final attempt at
penetrating the graphics workstation market before ultimately giving up and
exclusively selling X terminals. They are Motorola 88k-based machines
running UTek V, Tek's inhouse SVR3 port. The tower machines are quite
interesting in that the "compute" and "graphics engine" sides are
modular,
technically independent, and can be run standalone or stacked together for
more compute/graphics power depending on the customer's needs. They are
also the only machines I have ever seen that use the IEEE 896 "Futurebus,"
and although I could ramble for much longer, I should get to the point...
The VCF museum in New Jersey has an XD88/30 on permanent loan along with
its accompanying monitor, intact with original disks, but unfortunately no
peripherals. Over the past year or so I've slowly worked to restore it to
functionality and I have finally hit a roadblock I'm not sure I can figure
out alone. We were able to slurp an intact copy of UTek V off the original
hard drive before it failed, and after some power supply maintenance were
able to actually boot the machine off a SCSI emulator. It appears the
hardware itself is fully functional as the machine passes all diagnostics
and we are even able to navigate the filesystem over serial console. But
not having a keyboard means the system will not start X or do anything
graphical, as it assumes it is an XD88/01 headless machine.
We acquired a keyboard -- at moderate expense, they're unfortunately quite
desirable to collectors for some reason -- but quickly came to the
realization we were missing something else as the connectors were
physically incompatible and entirely different pinouts electrically. It
turns out, as mentioned in the manuals (available on the Tek wiki), the /30
(and probably /35) machines specifically use an "MIS" module inline with
the keyboard to combine inputs with the optional dial box. We do not have
this box and the manuals do not elaborate on if the box is "smart"/actually
does anything beyond simply combine pinouts. By beeping both sides out and
making up a little adapter with DuPont wires, we were able to power up the
keyboard and get it receiving data from the computer enough to come out of
a "lock-out" mode and start being able to transmit data of its own...but we
have not yet figured out how to get the computer to recognize its keyboard
and take in data to display on the screen. Without knowing if we're missing
any translating logic in the MIS box, we are at a bit of a brick wall.
I have some very rough pinout scribblings I can provide to try to make this
less confusing, and I haven't totally exhausted adapter combinations to
try...but I am putting out a plead for help! If anyone has an XD88, or
worked with them in any capacity, I'd absolutely love to talk and compare
notes. I threw some images of the system in an Imgur album for those
interested:
https://imgur.com/a/YFEbijI Once we're able to get the system
booted and able to wipe potential PII I would be happy to share the disk
image, since I know software for them is basically nonexistent and a
handful of the surviving machines were recovered diskless. In general I am
working on putting together a public page with my notes and research on the
machine to hopefully help anyone who might have one. Any questions and
comments are welcome!
Take care,
CJ R.