Re: Need help to reanimate an AT&T AT&T 3B1/7300 UNIX-PC

On 2008-03-26, Juergen Sievers <JSievers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 26 Mrz., 03:50, "DoN. Nichols" <dnich...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2008-03-25, Juergen Sievers <JSiev...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hallo DoN.

Thank you very much for your big replay.
To give you more information about the system I added some more high
resolution pictures to the following location.

http://www.nadhh.hanse.de.com/eBay/AT&T.UNIX-PC/

Again -- an unfortunate directory name this time. Please use
"-and-" in place of the "&" symbol since unix shells interpret the '&'
on a command line as the end of one command to be run in the background,
and the (possible) start of another, so when I cut and pasted that URL
to a command line to start up my browser pointed to that web page. it
tried to find one named:

http://www.nadhh.hanse.de.com/eBay/AT

and then tried to execute:

T.UNIX-PC/

as a command, which of course failed.


Hmm ... that is an unfortunate location in that there were
several versions of the CPU board, and on some there were empty pin
layouts which have been used for such things as modifying the system to
Oh, you are right; there are some unused areas on this location. So I
have taken a detailed picture from it. But I believe too, there must
have been a capacitor on this location.

accept two hard disk drives of up to 160 MB formatted (190 MB
unformatted) -- drives which were made by both Maxtor and Piram (I have

It is a ST51 (64MByte MFM Drive) and the controller chip is an
WD1010A.

O.K. That sounds pretty close to the standard for the 3B1
-- 67MB formatted for the system, 80MB unformatted.

[ ... ]

On the main board are eight rows a (8+1) 256er RAM chips installed.

Looking at the screen shots, plus the shots of the back of the
system, I would have to say that you have the full 2MB on the system
board, and 1.5 MB in a COMBO board (the one with the two DB-25
connectors on it). The other board is the ethernet board. You'll need
a transceiver to plug into the AUI connector visible and to accept
either 10BaseT (twisted pair with a RJ-45 connector) or 10Base2 thinnet
(BNC connector) depending on which network you happen to have.

4) Export (Not sure whether there were three versions of this, but
the modem and telephone connectors were disabled in this, either
because of differing modem standards, or just because some of the
countries did not want their citizens to have access to modems.

Which you got will depend on where you got it, among other
things. If you got it from an eBay auction in the USA, it probably has
the modem jacks active.

Yes, the system was used in USA and I??m sure the modem line is active.
As you can see on the pictures I own a expansion box too, on which are
one more modem line is available. But I never tried this box yet.

Actually -- what is likely to be in the expansion box is a Voice
Power card -- which was used to make answering machines (sometimes
multi-line -- one per card) from the computer -- and the right
software.)

Now -- the position of the component and the fact that it is
only two pins suggests that it is likely to have been a bypass
capacitor -- many were scattered around the system board to keep logic
OK, I decide it must be a capacitor. One like all the others in front
of each DIL-IC.

That is the most likely. The photo was too dark and too
out-of-focus in the back corner for me to get anything useful from it.
Will your Sony camera focus closer?

However -- looking at the CPU on a daughterboard with a PAL
beside it suggests that this has been modified to allow a user-level
program to do graphics access to the system to allow an alternative
windowing system to work. I forget the name of it, but AT&T was making
it available in source code format, and some people played with it.

The missing battery should be a 3V coin cell. The original had
solder tabs, but I tended to replace them with sockets for the 2032
cells. The major problem without that is that you will have to reset
the time every time you boot, and will wind up with a few files with
very strange dates before the boot reaches the point to set the time.

OK, I saw this message already and I??m glad to hear that there is no
setup or configuration SRAM which I have to set up proper first.

I see that there have been some red and black wires soldered to
where the cell goes, but it is not clear what else was done.

It looks as though the power connectors (both the one on the
stiff ribbon cable from the system board, and the row of pins on the
power supply) look to be in pretty good condition -- but I would still
suggest using the contact cleaner on it just to be sure that the power
is clean to the system or you will be constantly re-formatting the disk
drive.

Now -- from the rather oversized image of the system, what you
have seems to be a 3B1, as it has the raised area under the monitor stem
to clear the height of a full-height disk drive. The 7300 had only a
half-height drive. (Also, the file name for the missing part image was
a pain, with an '&' embedded, making it a pain to handle on a unix
command line.

I saw a file named ??unix?? on the root as also a link to it with a
uppercase name like ??UNIX351a?? or so. See pictures of screens.

Yes -- that is the kernel and is what is normally booted. If
you have the enhanced diagnostics floppy (and that one I am sure was
available on the net for download) it can install an alternate bootblock
which will boot from one of several diagnostics programs, the primary
one of which is in a file called "s4test". There were alternate
diagnostics on the installation floppys for things like the ethernet
board and the COMBO card among other things. I tended to keep them in a
subdirectory which I called /kernels so I could boot from one of them
easily -- instead of having to dig out the proper floppy.

Note that the s4test diagnostic program is needed to format your
disk -- there is no program on the installed OS to do it. And the
install floppy had a copy of s4test in it for formatting the disk during
installation -- but not the one which could handle formatting a second
disk.


As for your problem with booting -- the typical failure status
is for the inodes pointing to directories, or sectors making up part of
directories to be lost. resulting in the loss of quite a few files.
Many of them will be found and put in the lost+found directory by fsck,
but they will have names starting with a '#' and followed by the inode
number for the file, and you'll have to do a lot of detective work to
dig it out.

I??m willing to do all the work if the system would be get back to a
working state:)
But I can??t boot because I have no boot and installation disk now.
Some times after many retries the system has been booted from the HD.
But on that case many errors are appearing and I can not switch to the
graphical mode e.g.

I noticed that -- including one boot attempt trying to find a
program ".!" There was one in the system called ".!." which popped up a
window and scrolled the names of everybody who worked on the design
project through the screen.

So -- what you need is to boot from the first floppy of the
installation set, and progress from there, including booting first from

Oh yes, I would do that immediately if I would have a bootable floppy
disk??
I have some other old (MFM) systems which are able to write many
exotics disks formats on a 51/4?? disk. But for that I need the images
of the AT&T??s boot and installation disks. Do you or somebody else can
send a dd image to me?

Well ... about a year ago, I was building a directory of images
of the floppys -- but that seems to have been lost in a disk crash, and
I currently don't have room to set the system up again to repeat the
process. I had been planning to burn a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM for that, but
the crash came before that got done.

I guess that if all else failed, I can move the two Sun
Ultra-60s to clear sufficient space. The system is one which I had
modified to have two hard drives -- a 161 MB and a 67 MB (formatted).
Note, BTW, that you will also have problems with the Y2K situation. The
program which sets the unix time can't handle dates which start with
"20" in the year. I wrote a pair of programs -- one to run on the Suns
and to spit out the time as the number of seconds since the start of
1970 (as unix keeps its time), and the other to run on the 3B1 and to
re-install that time to set the date on that system. I was working on
other things for the time when I got the Sun Fire 280R which needed
the space where the 3B1 had been sitting when running.

But -- I remember someone else having a web site with downloads
for many of the floppys -- and I even supplied him with one or two which
he was missing. You may find it by going through the past two or three
years of the archives of this newsgroup. I'm pretty sure that it was
mentioned here and within that period.

Now -- the installation set puts in most of what you need,
That would be wonderfully if some installation set would do that :)
But I haven??t any installation set available yet ??

except a good editor and no compiler. And there was one floppy pair
which was not to be included with exports -- it had the crypto software
and the programs which used it (like an encryption capable vi editor) --
so it could be left out of export systems.

OK, I will not use the system for real work anymore. It should only
become a very nice piece of my collection of running systems.

O.K. And for that, you would not need the encryption set,
which I think that people coudl still get into big trouble for sending
out of the USA.

[ ... ]

If you find a place to download the floppies, beware that the
Unix-PC used two non-standard floppy formats. The typical MS-DOS

I??m full of hope you are such a place for me, isn??t ?

BTW what is your system using in place of an apostrophe "'"? Whatever
it is comes out as two '?'s together in my e-mail client, and in my
editor of choice. I see it twice in your line above.

machine of the period put nine sectors on a track. The boot floppy and
some others had eight sectors per track, and the rest had ten sectors

You are sure? I remember I was reading something about ten sectors???

Yes -- the system initially was distributed with only 8-sector
per track floppys, and then sometime near the 3.51 version or a bit
earlier, they found out that they could make it format the
10-sector-per-track floppys and work well with them. But the boot still
wants 8 sectors-per-track, so all diagnostic disks are in that format,
along with the first one or two install floppys.

per track -- making it difficult to build the floppies on anything other
than a 3B1. Some linux systems of the period had optional floppy
drivers which could generate and work with the odd sectored floppys, but
I never worked with that so this is only hearsay.

I use a old DOS machine with some tools from the good, old CP/ M era.
These tools can read and write many old disk formats. Hope it works
for my UNIX-PC too.

O.K. Is there an equivalent to DD on it too? I'm not sure
whether the images were DDs of the whole disk format, or of the CPIO
file which was normally how the install disks were implemented.

But given your museum focus, I suspect that you will want it as
close to factory supplied as possible, rather than as commonly modified
by the user community.
Yes, you are right. I prefer systems in their original state as like
as they were delivered.

[ ... ]

PS: Sorry about my bad English. My brain (if there is any) may be to
small to learn it much better. Abe rich kann etwas Deutsch, wenn das
helfen kann?

Your English is certainly much better than the little Deutsch
which I learned back around 1963 and never had a chance to use
afterwards. Since I had already learned and used Spanish in visits to
Latin-American countries, I was accused of being the only one in the
class who was speaking German with a Spanish accent. :-)

It looks as though your IP address range is not yet blocked for
spam (I've been fairly gentle on German sites, along with a few other
countries). So -- hopefully you can reach me by e-mail.

But perhaps there is another article in the newsgroup with a
pointer to the floppys, so we'll see.

Good Luck,
DoN.

--
Email: <dnichols@xxxxxxxxxxx> | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---
.

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