Jason T wrote:
Well I finally got the IBM - mine is a 6151/115. Not
sure what the
last digits signify. Original hard drive? I didn't think it's like
IBM to put the hard drive size on the faceplate like that.
Well done! I have the floor standing one, the 6150.
As someone said, 115 is a model number. It tells you a lot, if you can
look it up, but I don't have much 6150 documentation, so I don't think I
can.
Keyboard connector - definitely odd. Fortunately the
'board itself is
a regular Model M, which made replacing the keys damaged in shipping
easy. Unfortunately the cable is not modular on the keyboard end, so
I'll have to make sure to keep it out of range of the cats :)
The mouse looks like a strange connector, too. Unfortunately I got no
mouse with the system :(
I seem to recall that the 6150 had ribon-header style connectors for
practically everything, in a little metal shell, and the whole thing in
a rubber moulding that keyed with the appropriate hole in the back panel.
The mouse port seems to be serial at RS232 levels. I have the IBM part
number for the mouse (somewhere). I phoned IBM to see if I could order
one, and they said it was discontinued, and the replacement (I suspect a
PS/2 mouse with an adaptor) would be 150 pounds. They woudln't tell me
the part number of the replacement, or of the adaptor, so I gave up at
that point.
Interesting that you got a standard keyboard. Mine has the standard
layout, but slightly different key profile and different colours.
Don't know how much RAM I've got. How can I
tell? The system doesn't
turn the display on until AIX is booting, so if there's a POST screen
I can't see it.
Isn't there a 7 segment LED on the front for POST display? Don't think
it tells you the RAM, though. Best way to assess RAM is count the
chips, I'd think :-)
As everyone noted, it is *heavy*! I'm used to
heavy workstations from
the mid-80s (Sun 3, SGI and the like) but this one tops the list, at
least in my collection.
There is what looks like the standard IBM 37-pin external floppy
connector on one of the cards. Is that what it is? Or maybe for a
tape drive? If it's the latter I may even have a drive for it...
I would think floppy. Floppy drives and stuff were very PC-ish on the 6150.
All in all an interesting historical footnote machine.
I booted it
and played Hunt the Wumpus on it last night, so I'm happy with it. :)
I think all I ever managed to do with mine, apart from replace blown
diodes in the power supply, was run XINIT and do a screen dump to my
Proprinter XL. Amazingly, the Proprinter is one of the printers
supported with PIOBE. (PIOBE = Printer I/O Backend. IBM's solution to
having a common printer interface.)
Philip.