aviion 4000 info

pmulry wrote: It's highly possible that the NVRAM's lithium battery will have died ("gone flat") by now. This is the case with both the AV410 and AV4300 I have. My AV530s/5500 seem to be okay, but it's just a matter of time before they face the same problem. The machines with dead NVRAM will give some cryptic indication of the problem like printing "IDPROM" and nothing else, and refuse to initialize/boot on power-up. 'r. bear stricklin' was collecting NVRAM dumps for analysis, so we can try to load usable data into replacement parts, but I've no idea where that stands. I haven't bothered getting a part to see if, like Suns, the machine will function at all with an uninitialized NVRAM. Anyway if you search the archive for his name or Aviion I'm sure you'll find the relevant post. Or head to this URL: http://www.bears.org/~red/museum/aviion-nvram.html The 88k Aviions were frequently SMP capable, though unless you've got rackmount or square/big deskside units they're probably just 2-way. If you think the daughter card on yours is a second CPU complex, look for a chip marked 88100 or 88110; those are the CPUs. The 88200's or 88410 are cache/MMU chips. DG/UX will support SMP out of the box. It's a decent enough SVR4 implementation, with X11 (R?) and some sort of logical volume system. If you're looking for media I may be able to help out, contact me directly/off-list (smj0302 _ crash _ com). Martin Marshall wrote: If you dig around under there, there's a wealth of PDF files about various models. Operations guides, some about installing options and upgrading, low-level programming for a few models. There's been sporadic interest in getting *BSD running on the Aviions, but little activity. OpenBSD runs on several Motorola 88k boards, and I've recently managed to assemble the parts for a complete system, but that's as far as it's gone. I have no history porting OSes, and I'm much more focused on trying to find a job now, so you don't want to hold your breath waiting for me... --Steve.