16 Nov
1997
16 Nov
'97
9:10 a.m.
At 02:18 PM 11/16/97 -0500, Ward Donald Griffiths III wrote:
The marching blocks is almost always a sign of a serious motherboard
problem. One of my three suffers from it, so it's set aside for parts.
Unless that machine was shipped without an OS preinstall, which would
make it unique in my experience.
Actually, (if memory serves) from the time when the computer store I was in
was a dealer for them, they did *not* come with the OS preinstalled. There
were rather lenghty debates at the time over if we would charge for loading
it up before delivery.
It's well worth spending time with. A fairly
unique user interface over
Unix, a fine 68010 CPU. The case design I still consider one of the
sexiest _ever_ put on the market. Admittedly, the built-in 1200 baud
modem is pretty well a lost cause.
True on all count... Altho I think one of the things that really killed it
was the bit-mapped video sub-system that required the CPU to do all the
screen work.
If the OS level isn't at least 3.0, the disks are
fairly useless, though
some of the documentation may still be usable. There were some missteps
in integrating the Convergent Technologies kernel with the AT&T stuff.
The disks are labeled as v3.5
If you do get it to boot, there is a nice little Easter
Egg invoked by
the command ".!." from a shell prompt. That's dot-bang-dot. It'll
give
a list of the folks at AT&T, Convergent and Alloy who were involved in
the project. Some of whom I worked with or otherwise met in the early
90's at Unisys at the old Convergent campus in San Jose, though most had
gone on to other companies.
I like it...
And if you're interested, I may be able to supply a
DOS-73 card -- I've
got a couple I'm not using much -- not much runs these days on an 8086
with 512K and Hercules graphics.
That might make for some interesting tinkering...
If you don't get it to boot and you have the later
keyboard (with slots
to take function key labels) I'd be interested in the keyboard at least,
as those are not as common as the older keyboards I have -- the change
was made not long before AT&T bailed out of the project.
Boot or not (and I suspect it will) it will have a home in the collection.
-jim
---
jimw(a)agora.rdrop.com
The Computer Garage - http://www.rdrop.com/~jimw
Computer Garage Fax - (503) 646-0174