Subject says it all -- I unwittingly gave away my last AT case a while
back and now I have need to build an old 486 for a project. RE-PC in
Tukwila/Seattle has let me down, all they seem to keep around are ATX
cases these days.
Anyone have one to get rid of, cheap? Something mid-tower-ish would be
great, but I'm not too picky as long as it has a working power supply...
Thanks!
Josh
This afternoon I picked up a complete OSI Challenger 4P (model C4PMF)
with 5.25" disk driveand a stack of manuals. It's in decent shape and
I've been going over it and cleaning it up (with a little wood polish
for the sides :)). Power supplies seem to be working nominally so I've
fired it up, and it appears to be working correctly.
It came with half a dozen floppies, but they're in pretty sorry shape
and only one of them actually boots (well, almost boots - it errors out
after a little while into the boot process). I've of course cleaned the
drive's heads beforehand :). The C4PMF does not have a cassette
interface (alas) so I can't load cassette software on this thing. And
no BASIC in ROM, so if I want to bootstrap this thing over a serial port
I'll be entering in machine code to do it :).
So I have two immediate questions:
1) Is there an archive anywhere of disk images for this machine? I've
done a fair amount of searching and I haven't found much outside of a
few OS images included with emulators.
2) Anyone have any experience getting software onto the machine from a
"modern" PC? Can floppies for the C4P be written on a PC (using
ImageDisk or the like)?
Thanks for any advice. This looks like a really cool machine, and I
can't wait to get it running.
- Josh
First, note where the boards went then pull them out (carefully, those pins can be stubborn and can loosed from the backplane). Next check the power supplies. I have seen an old OSI supply put out 7V where it should have been 5V: that would be a disaster. The fact that someone put voltmeters in the case probably shows some paranoia in this respect!
Next, try re-installing boards and if you get lucky, it might just display "D/C/W/M" or rather "H/D/M" on the screen when it boots. The 505 CPU has only one ROM (not BASIC in ROM like many OSI systems did) and so is strictly disk-based (hence the prompt H/D/M). If the video works, try to boot a disk.
If it fails to show video, or the video looks completely scrambled with random characters, a likely culprit is memory: in many old OSI systems you see bad RAM that just seems to appear from nowhere. The 527 uses 2114's which are common at least.
If you get video, but not much else, you can try using the machine-code monitor (M) to diagnose the memory ... bitsavers probably has a doc on the OS65V monitor which will help (they were all about the same on OSI machines).
Professor Mark Csele, P.Eng.
Niagara College, Canada
300 Woodlawn Rd., L-23
Welland, ON, L3C 7L3
(905) 735-2211 x.7629
E-Mail: mcsele at niagarac.on.ca
URL: http://technology.niagarac.on.ca/people/mcsele
Author of "Fundamentals of Light Sources and Lasers", Wiley, 2004
Joe writes:
> I have a 3100 model 80 with a failing disk drive. The two drives in it
> now are Seagate ST15150N (I believe). I have a couple of questions:
> Are there NEW drives out there that will work with this VAX?
> What do I need to do to make a drive format/work?
ST15150N are excellent drives and were a great choice for ten years ago when
they started showing up widely in surplus. I have such a long and deep trust
in them, that I might recommend that you just find a few more :-)
Today if insisting on a new drive you'd probably get a 68 pin SCSI drive and
a 68-to-50 adapter cable. Example 68 pin SCSI drives still being manufactured
recently are Seagate Cheetahs 73 gig/ 147 gig. Similarly you could get an 80 pin
SCA drive and an adapter to take you down to 50 pin.
There's a lot of surplus SCSI drives out there newer than the ST15150N too.
Example adapter source: http://www.pc-pitstop.com/scsi_adapters/int_scsi_adapters.asp
> I installed the drives probably over ten years ago and I just don't
> remember if I had to format them special or on another box or what. I
> don't have the manuals any more, so I'm stuck.
Nothing special. Just stick it in, INIT or BACKUP to fill it up.
Older 3100's (like model 30) have some limitations on boot disks requiring some
tricks to use drives bigger than 1 gbyte but the model 80
is clear sailing.
Tim.
With any luck, I will be taking down the classiccmp server sometime this weekend for hardware upgrades and a complete reformat/reload. This includes the new raid controller and all new hard drives. It may be tonight, or sometime tomorrow... or all heck may break loose in other areas of my life this weekend and it gets postponed. I just wanted to give a heads up that if you stop seeing list traffic (and the classiccmp-hosted websites) that it's most likely intentional. I'll try to keep everyone posted.
Best,
Jay
THis is off-topic, I know, but I suspect there are some people here
interested in old telephones.
I have a Western Electric 500 telehpne on the bench. The standard US
rotary dial one.
As you may know, all the small components and the anti-sidetone
transformer ('induction coil') are in the metal box kown as the
'Network'. This is the normal type 425 unit
Anyway, I've remvoed this from the rest of the 'phone by disconencting
the wiring and drillign out the rivets (this was standard practice
accordign to one of the official repair manuals I read). I can refit it
using 6-2 UNC screws whcih are a perfect fit.
The 425 network was not field rpeairiable, and I can see why. After
bending up the tabs, I slid off the can to reveal the components in a
particularlly evil potting compound. It's not hard, it's sticky, I can be
scraped off (but I spent good quarter of an hour clenaing a screwdriver
after this). It will soften with heat (in fact a hot air paint stripper
gun wil lget it to drip off, but I was gettign the thing so hot that the
plastic terminal board was softening too). No solvent I have tried will
remove it.
The BSP docuemtns simply call it an 'insulating medium' which is not much
help :-).
Has anyone ever repaired such a Network block and knows how to shift this
stuff?
-tony
> it seems that there's a new issue with the bitsavers host. I regularly do
> an rsync for our mirror, but since a few days the connections are refused:
>
> rsync: failed to connect to bitsavers.org: Connection refused (146)
> rsync error: error in socket IO (code 10) at clientserver.c(122)
> [Receiver=3.0.7]
In AOL tradition, "Me Too" for my mirror ( http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/ ).
My presumption is that rsyncd simply isn't running at the far end.
BTW, I'm gonna set up public rsync for the pdp-10 and pdp-11 archives here
in my copious free time :-).
Tim.
Hi,
it seems that there's a new issue with the bitsavers host. I regularly do
an rsync for our mirror, but since a few days the connections are refused:
rsync: failed to connect to bitsavers.org: Connection refused (146)
rsync error: error in socket IO (code 10) at clientserver.c(122)
[Receiver=3.0.7]
Christian
