Data General NOVA 4/C help

[Henk Gooijen]

With thanks to Bruce, Jay and Rod, good news, although something
has gone wrong first. Learned a few things!  Long story ...

As I did not see anything on the Dasher D200 terminal screen, I first
checked the cable, assuming that the terminal did not develop issues
in the years being stored in the attic.
The cable checked out fine, and thus I now know which wires are RxD
and TxD (the cable is just 3 wires, no hardware handshake).
After connecting TxD to RxD anything typed on the keyboard appears on
the screen. So indeed, the terminal is OK.

Moving to the "UNIVERSAL LINE MULTIPLEXER PADDLE BD". Lots of wires are
soldered to this paddle board, but as far as I can see none of those
wires goes to any pin of the card edge connectors of slot #1, the NOVA
processor. I figured that perhaps traces on the backplane lead from
slot #1 to another slot, so I had a better look at the paddle board.
It has 5 identical rows of pins. Each row is 13 pins with pin 4 (or 10
depending where you start counting) removed.
Long story short, I did not see any signals on any pin when the NOVA is
reset.

Using the doc that I got from Bruce (tnx agn!) I tried to find signals
or voltage levels that might be something "RS-232-ish".
Hooked up two thin test wires (with small hooks). One on GND, the other
on the pin that would carry TxD. Stepping to the front of the computer,
where I could press the RESET button, and look at the scope screen.
RESET ... nothing, bummer.
Back to the rear side of the computer to hook up another pin ... smoke!
Smoke was coming from the GND test hook. Power off!

The hook plastic was molten and that produced the smoke. I could remove
the hook from the pin, but the hook is gone and the test hook is gone.
What went wrong?
After a few minutes I came to the conclusion that the pin that I assumed
to be GND was not GND, but something else, and most likely a power supply
pin. Looking again at the schematic drawing, I saw my error :-/

The NOVA has two card edge connectors, seeing from the rear, the left
connector is "A" and the right connector is "B". Further, each connector
has two rows of pins. In my ignorance of DG, I thought that the top row
of pins was "A", and the bottom row of pins is row "B". And each row has
100 pins ... dumb, dumb!
A simple count from 1 up, would have shown that one row has only 50 pins!
Each connector has all *odd* pins on the upper row and all *even* pins on
the bottom row.
Soooo, what I thought to be B99 (=GND) is actually pin A98, and that is
+5V.  It is a good thing that my test leads and hooks are small, so in
case of high currents the power supply will "win", the hook/wire "loose".
As the computer did not do anything "different", I hoped the power supply
could handle the "semi" short circuit.

With the new insight of how you should count the pins, I had another look
at the BERG header. The GND, RxD and TxD aligned with appropriate pins on
the top row, last series of pins of connector A. It could well be that
the connector (as it was hooked up when I picked up the machine) was not
correct! Also, I seem to remember the system originally had *two* D200s,
but I got only one terminal. Possibly the hooked up terminal was "the
other terminal", not the console terminal ... and the console terminal
would have been connected on the pins of connector A slot #1.
Hmmmm, let's try that. The signals would match as the RxD pin of the
terminal would connect to backplane pin A85 which is TxD, etc.
Another long story short ... :-)
Terminal on, waiting until the screen shows some background light, then
NOVA on (the rest stays off). Hurray!  I see an "O" appearing on the
screen and a second or so later, the letter "K" and on the next line
"!000000" and another line with "!"  This is exactly what should happen.

Getting bold now. Trying to boot from disk. So, I switched on the disk
drive. With my ear against the front panel, I can hear a sound that could
be a spindle drive. Then a rather loud "humming", a "click", the humming
stops and then I can still hear the spindle ... but the READY LED is on.
So, I RESET the NOVA. "OK !000000 !", but that's all, no joy. "OK", let's
try the floppy disk. I removed the front panel to switch the floppy drive
to be the boot device ... it already is the boot device!  No wonder that
nothing happened, because I had no floppy in the drive! Inserted the
"startup" floppy ... nope, no good. As the front cover was removed and
the disk was spinning (I assumed), I set the switch in the other position
so that the hard disk is boot device. RESET the NOVA again. The READY
LED flashes a few times and I get the text "FILENAME ?" on the screen!

I guess that the startup automatically starts the accounting application
as that program asks for a (customer) account file to be opened.
I had a glance over the doc that came with the system, so I "knew" a file
name that I could enter ... DOSINIT. That worked! However, the program
asks for a drive identifier. Not knowing what could happen (wipe disk...)
I aborted the program and switched off the disk and then the NOVA.

All in all a well-spent evening. With good feeling I closed my "museum"
and went back home (to type this).

- Henk