25 Mar
2000
25 Mar
'00
2:59 a.m.
Yeah, I used to maintain one of these beasts in the mid-80's.
It is a single 8086, with either 512 or 900-something k ram,
and it runs the Xenix-86 OS. The thing used a couple of Q540
disk drives, and with four users on it, swapped it's brains
out like you wouldn't believe.
The version of Xenix that was running on it at the time
couldn't decide if it was Edition 7 or System III-- fsck
said it was a System III fs, the banner on start up mentioned
something about Edition 7.
Anyways, it's amazing what some careful programming can
accomplish with <1MB ram, and an 8Mc 16 bit CPU. They
ran a cellular billing office with this thing, and they
would load subscriber data onto this thing from 7-track
(or was it 8-track ?) tape that they got from the mainframe.
I had to reload the Xenix OS once-- the default root password
is SOTLA :^).
Jeff
On Sat, 25 Mar 2000 08:09:04 -0700 "Richard Erlacher" <edick(a)idcomm.com>
writes:
Well, this model 586 has 5-1/4" drives in the
main unit and the tape
drive
is in a separate enclosure. These are desktop-style boxes, though I
doubt
theyd be used on a desktop. The hard drive is a full-height
nominally 40MB
5-1/4" drive. I've left this thing alone, though it's a source of
Z-80 type
system parts. The HDC is a 2900-based number not particularly
similar to
any other that I can recognize. The tape unit hasn't been opened
yet. I
may get to that some day, but I see the two boxes as a source of
parts and
little else. They're pretty heavy, so I don't anticipate shipping
them
anywhere.
Dick
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