17 Feb
1998
17 Feb
'98
5:20 p.m.
On 19 Feb 98 at 21:16, Ward Donald Griffiths III wrote:
The going price of $ 3500 wasn't an incentive either. I wonder how
many were sold ?
If you want I can catalogue what I have and send you copies when I
get this thing going.
Lawrence Walker wrote:
There is a circular hole, but it accesses the drive locking
(parking) mechanism. It seems to be like SCSI with 2 50-pin
A B Control sockets and 3 A B C 20 pin Data sockets . I have a
50-pin line terminator pack for it. The drives have a label saying "
this unit contains a line terminator " Haven't opened them up yet.
On the front panel a lock-key turns power on or off. I' ve only one
key but it seems to work with all 3. It has 2 buttons one labelled
Protect and one labelled Active. Possibly illuminated (haven't fired
them up yet.)
The II itself has a cage for 8 cards occupied by 5 cards, card 1 has
cables leading to 2 female DB25 "serial port A B' ,card 2 has a
cable to the int. fdd and one to a M 34-pin parallel printer port,
card 3 is for the ext. hdd , the like-new card 4 has no cables looks
like a memory card and card 5 is hard-wired to the CRT board.
Do you know whether it had some sort of fdd select jumpers ?
I'll switch cables and see if it will boot off the ext. fdd.
No, I didn't hook up the HDD s . There were
3 of them and no visible
numbering as to order of placement. I'll have to get under the hood
and see what I can see, and/or try the external floppy DD. I'll let
you know
On the bottom of each drive box, is a circular plate or a hole where it
used to be. One of the drives should have a blue DIP terminating
resistor pack. That would be the last drive in the chain. The first
drive in the chain will be the one with the power switch.
As well as the
CP/M it also has an Exenix Install set.
Likely installed on one of the 5meg HDDs
If so, this is no mere Model 2, but a Model II with a Model 16 upgrade
kit installed. I would cheerfully take this system off your hands to
sit between my early Model II and my Tandy 6000HD.
Note to all: As you visit the swap meets, ham fests, thrift stores and
whatnot, I am trying to acquire a bunch of software packages for the
Tandy 8" product line, especially the documentation. As Lawrence
mentioned in his first message, there is remarkably little information
on the Web about this product line, primarily because they were never
as popular with hobbyists as the 1/3/4 or Color Computer lines --
they were designed, built and marketed as business machines, and when
they were replaced by peecees years later, most business just tossed
the machines and the software packages into the dumpsters.
These machines are truly dear to me -- while I may
have started with a
Model One (before it was called that), the Model II and its upgrades and
successors are where I grew up. Xenix on the Model 16 is where my long
relationship with Unix and its relatives began. And in my arrogant
opinion, Scripsit 2.0 on the Model II is _still_ one of the best damned
word processors ever if the object is to process words rather than make
documents look pretty.
--
Ward Griffiths
ciao larry
lwalkerN0spaM(a)interlog.com