TI DS990/1

Today's acqisition here is a TI DS990 Model 1 Intelligent Terminal. This designation appears to be a complete misnomer as it is in fact a full microcomputer. The case appears to be laid up in fiberglass from the same mold as a TI 820 KSR, and the logic bus has 86 pins, which I recall processor (nice BIG white ceramic JDL part with gold pins), 64K of ram (4116's, plus parity), a TMS9900 based I/O controller board, 2 asych serial cards, floppy disk controller, and a VDU controller. Going by the configuration table on the back of the case there were other options available as well, including "GPH", which I am wondering whether might be some sort of bit-mapped graphics display. The backplane has a total of 12 slots, 7 occupied. There are what appear to be 3 serial connectors on the back of the case, but they do not connect directly to the serial cards. They go through the bus apparently. I've never had my hands on an 820, but I don't think they're this elaborate, and the 911 VDT's I have certainly aren't. Nice hefty modular 200W linear power supply with its own bus, too. This particular unit has seen some rough handling at some point, and is missing a few keycaps, but it is clean, and powers up. There's a nice raster on the screen, but no cursor. Apparently it must boot off a disk. There's a 25 pin connector on the back of the case which must be for a cable to a FD800/1000 dual 8" drive (which I don't have yet). The "IDLE" and "EXEC" lights on what amounts to a minimal front panel on the keyboard light up, but that's it. No "ERR", anyway. Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong, so I can track down the problem. In actual use, from what I was told, it was probably hooked up by modem to Tymshare, the predecessor of Tymnet, and thence to a central facility. It has lttle bezels on the front shoulders of the case that identify it as a Tymshare Travel Business System BS2000. As an aside, I did a little searching, and apparently MCI/Worldcom is still running Tymnet, now on rackmount Sparc-based nodes rather than the earlier PDP-10's.and M68K's (I preferred Telenet for X.25; they were always a year or two ahead on dial-in speeds where I was.) Anyway, if anyone has manuals or software, in particular a bootable system disk, for this machine, I'm all ears. Likewise, if anyone has any questions about it, I'll do my best to answer them. jbdigriz -- ---------------------------------------------------------------- DragonsWeb Labs - Custom R&D, Software, & Hardware ---------------------------------------------------------------- Tagline for Tuesday, February 22, 2000 If rabbits feet are so lucky, what happened to the rabbit? ---------------------------------------------------------------- James B. DiGriz - jbdigriz(a)dragonsweb.org - (912) 653-5139 ----------------------------------------------------------------