On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 12:27 PM, Mr Ian Primus <ian_primus at yahoo.com> wrote: The disk has either 8" or 9" platters; the original drive (which was replaced year back) was a Priam so the new one may be the same or it might possibly be a CDC. It's not totally clear whether the problem is in the drive or the controller. The drive spins up, but the disk diagnostic test fails. John -- "I've tried programming Ruby on Rails, following TechCrunch in my RSS reader, and drinking absinthe. It doesn't work. I'm going back to C, Hunter S. Thompson, and cheap whiskey." -- Ted Dziuba

On Feb 11, 2009, at 1:16 PM, Mr Ian Primus wrote: All: Greetings- I am the person that has the NIcolet 660 in my lab. John is working with me to get the system back up and eventually get it relocated. With John's permission, I'm going to answer some of these questions directly, since I guess I have the most first-hand knowledge of what the current state of the system is. The diagnostic on the computer as run from a floppy, There are several diagnostic programs on a separate 3.5" disk. System can be booted either from a floppy or from the SMD disk. The SMD drive was replaced in 1988, the system was delivered and set up in 1986. So it's a fairly old drive. The whole unit was in working condition up to about 2 years ago, when the SMD boot-up problem occurred. Can't say at this point- the disk is enclosed in a rack-mounted case and it's fairly difficult to get the rack out to get physical access to the disk. I do remember when I looked at it last that the disk appeared to be spinning up (it gives that characteristic "whine" of the platters spinning up), but the unit is in an area where there is a large amount of air flow ( a chem lab) and it's difficult to make out any other sounds. I never did look at the diagnostic led's on the drive itself- maybe they were buried toward the back of the rack unit and hard to see- I don't remember for sure. Yes, I was able to boot from the Nicolet Operating System (NICOS) floppy disk and run tests from the diagnostics floppy, but as I remember the disk diagnostic program (SMDBUSTER) returns a NIcolet error code (which I don't have any documentation on) and a text error message which says "disk not accessible" (or something like that). With John's help, we will try to open the unit up later in the week to get more details and see if we can find those drive status lights- maybe they will give more of a clue. Regards, Ken Marshall Kenneth L. Marshall Research Engineer, Optical Materials Laboratory for Laser Energetics University of Rochester 250 East River Rd Rochester, NY 14623 Phone: (585)-275-8247 Fax: (585)-275-5960

On 11 Feb 2009 at 13:20, Dave McGuire wrote: I used a Nicolet Logic Analyzer years ago and really liked it. And Nicolet-Zeta made some very fine plotters. In the 70's, Nicolet made a foray into medical CT equipment. I remember that they left a lot of X-ray equipment around for trash pickup when the operation closed. I was sore tempted to filch a box of Picker X-ray tubes they had left out, but conscience got the better of me. Cheers, Chuck

Fabritek also made a digital scope - spectrum analyzer like thing about the same time. RCS has one - we have never played with it. It is a real power sucker, as it is crammed with early MECL 1 ECL (in cans!). I am pretty sure it has a core stack in it as well. -- Will

I too have one but mine came with manuals but was missing some interconnect cables the manuals are not yet in my calalog or scanned. Just been to the Digital Lives Conference and I get the impression that there is NO effort by any official archive to collect manuals and such, test equipment seems to be a poorly covered area in the museum and archive world. Dave Caroline

Dave Caroline wrote: If you're ever inspired to scan the manuals (or perhaps the pertinent bits like the schematic) I would be interested of course, but I imagine it's a fair volume in total. The unit here has some intermittent it seems, it will display a live trace IIRC, but the storage and statistical algorithms don't seem to work. I did see it average a noisy sine wave (finger on input) at one point but it doesn't seem to do that anymore. I reverse engineered the DACs and core memory circuitry, but there's a hundred or two SSI ICs and laced wire bundles remaining that I haven't worked up the enthusiasm to RE. Nice to hear there are a couple others of these units out there still. It's an area of interest to so few people, one has to be well inside the technical arena as well as have an interest in the history, for such stuff to hold any interest. I wonder what will happen to some of the obscure boat anchors I have here when I have to divest.

Nicolet = desirable! Twenty years ago, they were making high end digital storage oscilloscopes. I have one of the ones they threw out at work a couple of years later, when they upgraded to a later Nicolet model. I haven't done anything with it yet, but it's solidly built, has a bitslice (4*2901 iirc) processor and a 5.25in floppy drive or two. Philip.

Was it Nicolet that made that ultra fast sampling scope with liquid cooled JJs? At the time the sampling rate was phenomenal, but you needed a tank of liquid nitrogen handy. Mid 80s? -- Will

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 9:19 PM, dwight elvey <dkelvey at hotmail.com> wrote: As I understand it, the 660 was used for the same purpose--doing FFTs with chemical lab equipment. John -- "I've tried programming Ruby on Rails, following TechCrunch in my RSS reader, and drinking absinthe. It doesn't work. I'm going back to C, Hunter S. Thompson, and cheap whiskey." -- Ted Dziuba

Fascinating, in the early 80's I ran a FTIR (Fourier Transform Infrared) spectrometer that was attached to a Nicolet 1080. The system had a Diablo 42 disk I seem to remember. You would have to wait for the thing to spin up before booting. It would digitize the FTIR signal and perform the required FFT's to obtain the infrared spectrum. It had some kind of Nicolet software that would do the spectral processing. It also had a Fortran compiler which I used to do some specialized processing. If you got a picture it sure would bring back old memories. Doug At 09:19 PM 2/11/2009, you wrote:

On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 12:10 AM, dwight elvey <dkelvey at hotmail.com> wrote: Could you explain about head locks? I have never heard of the term. Thanks John -- "I've tried programming Ruby on Rails, following TechCrunch in my RSS reader, and drinking absinthe. It doesn't work. I'm going back to C, Hunter S. Thompson, and cheap whiskey." -- Ted Dziuba

On Feb 14, 2009, at 12:48 AM, Chris Kennedy wrote: I can guarantee that the heads are not locked. The NIC 6600 workstation was working condition, 24/7 until about 4 years ago, when I came in one morning to use the FTIR spectrometer it was connected to and got the SMD timeout error when trying to access the FTIR software on the SMD disk. Spent some time back then checking for loose cables and other obvious problems, but couldn't find anything that stood out. It had been running fine the previous day- no power outages in the building, etc. It's been powered down in it's original location since then,until this week. Ken Marshall Kenneth L. Marshall Research Engineer, Optical Materials Laboratory for Laser Energetics University of Rochester 250 East River Rd Rochester, NY 14623 Phone: (585)-275-8247 Fax: (585)-275-5960

On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 7:26 PM, John Floren <slawmaster at gmail.com> wrote: Ken Marshall took some more photos today and I must say they look *good*. You can check them out at http://csplan9.rit.edu/magic/webls?dir=/users/john/nicolet Apparently, when he booted the computer to get some shots of the diagnostics disk etc., it booted straight into the OS from the hard drive as though nothing had been wrong! It continued to do this for several reboots, but after running unattended for a few hours the hard disk was again unreachable. We're not sure if this is due to a slowly-failing drive, or because of a bad connection somewhere. Hopefully it's just a loose cable, but it seems too early to tell just yet. John Floren -- "I've tried programming Ruby on Rails, following TechCrunch in my RSS reader, and drinking absinthe. It doesn't work. I'm going back to C, Hunter S. Thompson, and cheap whiskey." -- Ted Dziuba