Data General NOVA 4/C help

[Rod Smallwood]

Well done Sir!!
                           Knowing the terminal is OK is a real booster.

Regards Rod


On 20/10/2015 20:45, Henk Gooijen wrote:
> 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