WTB: Solbourne computer

On Wed, May 23, 2018 at 9:58 AM, Alan Perry <aperry at snowmoose.com> wrote: I talked with my friend who worked at Solbourne longer than I did. This isn't quite right. The connectors are different, but the signalling is the same. You need a custom adapter, though, so you get the right signals on the right pins. Solbourne specifically made their keyboards incompatible with Suns at the connector level to force people to buy keyboards from Solbourne, but used the same basic parts as Sun keyboards to save on development costs. While the big battleship keyboards have extra keys, the scan codes for the basic keys are the same (though he cautioned me that was only his memory, but based on how fanatical they were about being Sun compatible). After he told me that, I recalled that I found an odd cable a few years ago in my big box of cables that could have been such an adapter, though I don't have it any more. He suggested using the SE guide that was on bitkeepers to make an adapter. I went looking for special keyboard maps for the Solbourne, and all I found was Tom LaStrange's name in twm from the updates he did while working at Solbroune, so maybe my friend is right. I'd have expected to find that they would have been in X11R4 or X11R5, but no dice. The CG30 card was a simple clone of sun's cg3 dumb frame buffer. The graphics card had to be 100% code compatible with Sun, so it would be odd to have different. I also couldn't find anything in my .x* files, even though I had OI specific resources I deleted in 2010... He confirmed the mouse thing was 100% correct. He used that setup for several years. Though I was incorrect: he gave all his Solbourne stuff to a local computer museum that seems to have disappeared... Warner