SGI IRIS 1400 (longish)

As many folks might have already noticed, I've been a little absent from the mailing list as of late. One reason is the current status of upgrading my day to day workstation, but the other is the latest SGI system that I got from Nick here in Houston. The small amount of information I found on the web about SGI IRIS 1x00 line seems to indicate that the 1400 is the first "workstation" class system SGI sold. The 1000 and 1200 were both GUI terminals without any local storage. These systems were all made in the early 1980s, and no one seems to know just how many were made. For those folks who have never seen a 1x00 or 2x00 desk-side SGI IRIS, the chassis is about twice the size of a DEC BA123 (not too much wider), but it seems to weigh a little less. (The custom Hitachi monitor for the 1400 actually seems to weigh more than the system.) This 1400 is more or less complete. It has it's monitor, all the cables (except for the two power cords), the keyboard, mouse, and a set of programmers manuals. If someone has an OS or diagnostics tape (of even knows which versions of IRIX this system will support), please let me know. A hardware manual would also be very nice, but I'm not going to hold my breath... While breaking the system down for a complete cleaning and inspection, I found a couple of notes and tags in the system from a previous sysadmin. One is a hand-drawn card cage ribbon cable/led diagram on a scrap of paper (which might turn out to be useful ;) There was a tag attached to the corner of the ST-506 interface board, that states something along the lines of "Board removed from IRIS, suspect U/S, no prints.", and has a set of initials on it. There was also a tag attached to the ribbon cable that connects the AUI connector on the rear of the system to the network interface board. The cable had been unplugged, and the tag stated something along the lines of "This cable was found to be damaged when removing the PSU, do not reconnect!", and showed a date of 1996 and two sets of initials. It turned out the "damage" was minor, and could have been safely ignored. The ribbon cable had originally been 15 conductor, but had been stripped down to 14 conductors, except for one loose 8" wire at the AUI end. That wire is connected to pin 1 of the AUI connector, and it appears someone had crimped a 0.25" quick connect terminal to it and connected it to an unused chassis ground terminal on the line filter. Pin 1 didn't even exist on the card end of the cable, so my guess is someone modified the cable due to interference problems. When I found the loose wire, it had been pulled loose from the quick connect terminal, and had some (cheap) electrical tape wrapped around the end. This particular system was located in England from around 1983 to 1998 or so, and had been converted for 240V operation. It appears the conversion was done by a SGI field tech, since the rear of the system has a sticker that states "115V", while the metal plate with the IEC connector states "230V". The PSU has a typewritten SGI sticker with a 184-260V(?) voltage range covering the 115V rating next to the supply terminals. After looking at the PSU itself, it appears conversion back to 115/120V requires little more than desoldering/resoldering some jumper wires. The 3 system fans will also have to be replaced when converting the system back to 120V. I also noticed an extra white wire run up to the front panel where the power switch is mounted. There is a black wire used for hot, and a red wire used for the switched hot. The white wire is connected to the unswitched hot (or what would be neutral for 120V operation), so I'm guessing this system would have originally used a lighted rocker switch before the 240V conversion (there are no power on indicators on the front of the system). There are also 4 extra wires in the junction box behind the bottom rear panel. Two are white and are on what would be the neutral side, one is black, which is unswitched hot, and the other is red, again switched hot. My guess is that these were originally used for accessory outlets on the original panel, which was replaced during the 240V conversion. I found quite a few things that had not been reinstalled properly at some point, but one thing that really sticks out were the "missing" spacer washers used for the 5V 100A power supply connections. I actually found the pair of washers used under two of the bolts that mount the PSU to the system chassis. I ended up replacing some of the crimp-on connectors for some of the power supply connections. I think the original system builder must have been having a bad day, because there were a number of those terminals that were not crimped properly. About 50% of the screws that are supposed to hold the system together were also missing. I guess one of the former service techs in England didn't like removing/installing screws... After completing the cleanup/inspection, I checked out the supply voltages (without any boards installed in the card cage and without any drives installed) and found all the supply voltages to be within spec. I reinstalled all the boards, and checked it out again, at which point the system appeared to be functioning properly (according to the diagnostic display on the rear of the system). I then reinstalled the hard drive, and connected the monitor. I got an image on the monitor, but the picture was very, very poor. It looks like the monitor will need to be recapped. I was able to read it well enough to see that I got the initial monitor display with a 'boot>' prompt. I wasn't able to boot the system though, since there does indeed appear to be something wrong with the ST-506 interface (I got continuous "timeout" errors for md:0). There could also be something wrong with the hard drive (which appears to have been serviced at some point), but since there was a tag attached to the ST-506 interface board, it is my primary suspect. The SGI sticker under the front panel on this system shows it as serial number 95 (same as on a rear sticker), and all the boards installed in the card cage (with the exception of the ST-506 interface) appear to match the numbers on that sticker. I'm kinda wondering if someone might have used this 1400 as a source for a spare ST-506 interface, but I'll probably never know. The ST-506 interface thats currently installed in this system appears to be of 3rd party origin, though maybe all of the ST-506 interface boards for the 1x00 and 2x00 systems were. The SGI sticker also shows the backplane cut to be 9/10, but inspection showed that it actually has a 11/12 cut. There is also another SGI sticker underneath the visible one, and it appears this system was originally serial number 47, also with a 11/12 backplane cut. Does anyone have any info on these systems? There doesn't seem to be much information left, and very little can be found on the web. I'm somewhat tempted to try contacting SGI for a little more information, but I don't know if there would still be anyone still there who would know anything about this system. If there is any interest, I'll see about putting up some pictures of this system over the next couple of weeks. -Toth