On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 1:00 PM, Sander Reiche <reiche at ls-al.eu> wrote:
I was wondering about the Tektronix 4317 machine. The only information I'm
able to find online is the catalog introducing it:
http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/tektronix/\
44xx/4300_Series_1988_Catalog.pdf
The rest inside that bitsavers PDF (or Bits corner for that matter) don't
even
mention the 4300 series.
Wow...what a great machine. I spent some time with Smalltalk on one in the
before-times. Really advanced, well made little box for the time (and
expensive).
I gather it should run UTek 3.1, but where could I try
to find the media
(which
is 5.25" floppy I think) for that O/S?
I'm afraid I don't know what the last UTek was for that box, but 3.1 is a
reasonable guess. UTek did come on QIC tapes (which is what we used); I
never loaded it from floppies or saw a floppy distro. That said, most of
my UTek stick time was on later versions and later hardware (XD88
workstations). I can't imagine where one would find the install media
these days other than lucking onto someone with a similar machine.
I vaguely recall that all 4xxx machines could be loaded from the same
distro media, but I can't confirm that. That said, if you do find someone
with a working system, you could clone the drives. They're SCSI, and 'dd'
just fine.
Does anyone know of the connections which can be made
on such a machine?
Not sure exactly what you mean by "connections", but I'm pretty sure the
one we had had ethernet, serial, PIO, and SCSI. And the video output of
course.
Good luck with it. I'd love to have one running Smalltalk and/or Lisp.
KJ