Re: 3B2 Disks
- From: billg999@xxxxxxxxxxx (Bill Gunshannon)
- Date: 12 Jan 2009 01:44:14 GMT
In article <slrngml5q6.hl.dnichols@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"DoN. Nichols" <dnichols@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
On 2009-01-11, Bill Gunshannon <billg999@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <slrngmirtg.e2f.dnichols@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"DoN. Nichols" <dnichols@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
On 2009-01-11, awesie@xxxxxxxxx <awesie@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[Originally posted in comp.sys.att. Forwarded here on recommendation.]
I have a 3b2 that works but whose password has been lost to the ages.
I have a copy of the disk images for the 3b2 including the "System
Essentials" disk, but I need to find a way to get these onto a floppy.
O.K. I've never worked with a 3B2 -- just the 3B1 -- but what
is the floppy size -- 5.25" or 3.5"
The 3B1 and the 3B2 have nothing in common with each other.
The vendor. And the fact that they both are computers.
And the fact that they both ran SysVr? OS versions (with various
add-ons. :-)
And -- I've got a 3B2 external drive housing attached to one of
my 3B1s, to hold both the boot drive (no longer internal) and the second
drive, plus a "floppy tape" drive. Granted, it took a bit of creative
wiring to do that all.
But since they both were SysV unix, there may well be enough
similarity in disk formats to allow one to look at a disk belonging to
the other.
I gave some thought to recommending hooking one of the disks up
to another computer, but regardless of the possibility of the
filesystems being compatable I doubt the controllers used would
allow for something other than another member of the 3B2 family
(3B12/3B15/3B20) being able to read the disk in its present format.
But I suppose there would be no loss in trying.
And *any* SCSI disk (if his system uses SCSI, either a direct
SCSI disk, or a MFM or such adapted to SCSI by an external card) should
be readable on a sector-by-sector basis to allow some of my suggestions
to work. After all -- the two systems which I described gaining access
to were not even AT&T products -- one was Tektronix with the NS 32016
CPU, and the other was Intergraph with a Fairchild "clipper" CPU. The
first ran a BSD flavor of OS, and the second a SysV flavor. The first I
broke the password on using a 3B1 as the password cracking engine, and
the second I accessed the raw sectors on using a Sun 2/140 (BSD to
access a drive from a SysV based system.
I guess anything is worth the try if the alternative is to use them
as doorstops (something they do quite well, actually). Funny you
should mention SCSI. I actually heard there was a 3Bfamily SCSI
controller but I suspect they were even rarer than QBUS or UNIBUS
SCSI controllers. Well, maybe they became popular after NCR took
over the running of AT&T's 3Bfamily. Did you ever hear about the
NCR "upgrade" for the 3B2 computer systems? :-)
The 3B1 was
a Convergent Technologies box sold by AT&T and the 3B2 was an AT&T designed
and manufactured box using the WE32000 CPU.
Both with the AT&T "Death Star" logo, and similar color schemes,
FWIMBW.
Yeah, also sported by the AT&T 6300 family which was made by Olivetti
in Italy. And wasn't compatable with anything, not even the IBM PC
which was the actual model for the hardware.
I will look later today, but,
sadly, I believe I threw all my 3B2 software away years ago when my last
3B2 died. If I still have any of them, they yours for the postage.
And -- if you *don't* have them, it is still possible that he
may be able to use some of the ideas which I covered.
He is free to do whatever he wants. It's just that having had a number
of them myself I was offering my experience which was that they were
not really compatable with anything (that, I am fairly certain, was by
design) and by todays standards not really worth a lot of effort. While
I really liked the processor (and I have the architecture manual here
somewhere, I know I kept that for my library) many of the components were
did not seem particularly well made and eventually all of mine failed.
Compare that to how many other, much older computers are still in
almost daily use.
I wish him luck. Oh yeah, I looked. Either I gave away or threw away
all the sets of software I had. I suspect gave away as I seldom throw
any software out and would more likely have recycled the floppy disks.
I do still have the floppy drives, the floppy tapes and I think I may
even still have the hard disks here somewhere. I have always wanted to
see if I could write a driver to let me use the tape drives on something
like a PDP-11.
bill
--
Bill Gunshannon | de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n. Three wolves
billg999@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx | and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton |
Scranton, Pennsylvania | #include <std.disclaimer.h>
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