Re: 3B2 Disks

On 2009-01-12, Bill Gunshannon <billg999@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <slrngmleaj.hl.dnichols@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"DoN. Nichols" <dnichols@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
On 2009-01-12, Bill Gunshannon <billg999@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <slrngml5q6.hl.dnichols@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"DoN. Nichols" <dnichols@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
On 2009-01-11, Bill Gunshannon <billg999@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[ ... ]

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.

If it is purely a MFM drive, yes, it would be difficult to
access from another system.

Mine were, 2 MFM drives on a custom (Western Electric) controller.

O.K. Any clues as to whether it was implemented as a
MFM<-->SCSI adaptor and a SCSI controller? Or did it plug directly into
the system bus?

There was *one* SCSI controller for the 3B1 which a member of
this newsgroup used to have (and may still have). It was being
developed by his company just about the time the bottom dropped out of
the 3B1 market. So -- he got to take it home and play with it.

I actually used my first MFM drives (a pair of Ampex 27 MB
drives) using a MFM<-->SCSI adaptor and a hand wire-wrapped host adaptor
on a system which was dual-boot -- SSB's DOS-69 and Microware's OS-9
(the *real* one, before Apple claimed the name for the Mac. :-)

OS-9 handled it a lot more gracefully than DOS-69 did, because
when you blend a 6.3 filename format fixed upper case with a lack of
subdirectories, 27 MB becomes *very* unweildy. :-)

Those systems shared four 8" floppys and four 5.26" floppies as
well.

But a friend had a 3B2 which had a SCSI interface, and used MFM
(or were they IDSE) drives on a shared adaptor. I believe that the
adaptor could handle up to four drives at once, but he only had two on
it.

I have seen SCSI<->MFM adapters (I actually have one, but have no idea
what it came out of) but the only SCSI I heard about on the 3B's used
pure SCSI disks.

O.K. Those would have been the later ones, of course.

Those drives, *with* the adaptor, could be accessed a sector at
a time from any SCSI system using the "raw" interface. It would be
fairly easy to write a C program which would do that and look for a
sector which started "root:.*:0:0:" (Wildcarding for the password field
to allow for no password (not the case here),

Actually, you could. drop the password, move the uid and gid and use
the GCOS field to suck up the extra character spaces.

That would work -- it just requires some careful character
counting to get it to come out right. I consider it a bit more
error-sensitive. :-)

a real password, or a
redirection to a shadow password, depending on the age of the system.

Never saw shadow passwords on an 3B I worked with. I don;t think they
were around long enough for that to become the practice.

I remember having an open source implementation of shadow
passwords, but I never dared to install it -- too much chance of not
being able to access the system if something screwed up. Kind of like
some company which suggested removing the passwords from the /etc/passwd
file and putting them in a database. That scared the others in
comp.unix.wizards at the time -- though now that is just what the unix
under Mac's OS-X does.

If a redirection, then re-do the program to look for "root:.*:" without
the "0:0:".

Given the age of the system, the length of the password field
would be constant with the standard password hashing system, making it
easy to do a raw disk edit on that one sector to replace it with the
hash of a *known* password. (Anything which changed the length of the
field would of course require adjusting everything which followed in the
password file.

Putting in a known hash is probably the easiest way but you could also
do what I said above to get rid of the password entirely.

Agreed!

[ ... ]

You want a serious doorstop? Try my Intergraph Interact 32/C.
Two 19" monitors mounted on top of a wheeled chassis containing most of
the rest, with a big (24x36" IIRC) digitizing tablet hinged to the front
with an air cylinder to allow adjusting the angle while a pressure point
was pinched. The digitizing tablet and the puck acted as the mouse,
with about a dozen buttons on it.

It was designed as a graphics workstation, but I didn't have the
software to use it as such. I now have the software, but I don't have
the license keys to allow me to use the software.

The edge of the digitizing tablet had another pair of pressure
points to raise or lower the tablet and the monitors as a unit, and
another pair to tilt the monitors forward or back to adjust so you
could use it comfortably seated low, on a draftsman's stool, or
standing.

OK, I'll see your Intergraph and raise you a Tektronix 4300 family
graphics station.

Was that the one with a QIC tape drive in the right pedestal? I
think that I have the tapes from one hiding somewhere around. :-)

The Intergraph was a significantly larger and heavier beastie.
I had to run it up two deck plank boards to get it into the bed of my
pickup, and those boards were sagging about 6-8" below the centerline
between the ends. :-) I kept expecting them to break. I would guess
about 600 pounds. I've got machine tools which weigh a lot more, and
I'm not sure what the weight of the 6' rack filled with a Sun 3/260 and
three Fujitsu Eagles was. A lot, for sure. :-)

Ran not only thier custom stuff but also CPM-86.

Ouch! I never knew what the CPU was in the beastie we had
hanging around in the hall for a year or two after we moved into that
building. It finally found an owner to turn it in during one of the
regular property roundups -- someone got tired of having to travel to
our building to verify that it was still there. :-)

I still keep a couple of the magnets fopr biasing the digitizing
tablets around for erasing disks. The magnet was so powerful they
came packed inside a steel pipe when you bought a terminal. :-)

Our computer center had a color laser copier/printer (full
office sized one, not a desktop machine) and someone zapped the boot
floppy with one of those bias magnets. :-)

And then, I used to have an Apollo Workstation. Now there's a boat
anchor.

O.K. Not sure of the weight or size for those. I'm impressed
enough with the 60+ pounds of my Sun Blade 2000 machines, and the
somewhat heavier rack-mount version (the Sun Fire 280R).

My Tektronix 6130s were fairly light by comparison. About the
size of the original IBM PC.

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.

Hmm ... I'm afraid that I can't ask the friend about it, as he
is no longer with us.

Did you ever hear about the
NCR "upgrade" for the 3B2 computer systems? :-)

No -- how bad was it?

As you may or may not know, after the big court fight when AT&T actually
got permission to be in the computer business commercially, they decided
they didn't want to. So they brought in NCR to run that division. NCR's
first move was to "upgrade" the 3B2. Simple upgrade, really. Open case.
dump all 3B2 related parts into garbage can. Insert NCR designed and
manufactured M68K based computer into case. Upgrade completed. :-)

Ouch! The name is the same -- but it won't run the same
software at all. :-(

[ ... ]

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.

And -- it had to have the date routine in the OS patched every
eight years. The clock chip in that only counted through eight years
(just enough so it would keep the right years as leap years), and the
patch added the proper starting point to the eight-year count in the
chip.

Didn't know about that one but then I never saw one that lasted 8 years. :-)

A friend was still working at a place which used these things
when the *second* update time came around, and I was able to get the
patch for her through the help of someone in this very newsgroup. But
imagine a *business* still using a 16-year old PC sorta clone. :-)

Apparently a few did in this office. She no longer works there,
so I don't know whether they finally upgraed to something else. :-)

Of course, they had no support contract when the problem hit, so
if I had not been reading about it on this newsgroup, they would have
been forced into an upgrade then and there. :-)

[ ... ]

Well ... I just recently acquired a SGI Indigo 2 (the version
with the really weird R8000 MIPS processor which had floating point as
fast as integer math.

I got rid of a pair of Indigos a while ago. I do still have an O2.
Also SPARCStation-II, Ultra Sparc, a couple of original MAC's, a bunch
of newer M68K MAC's, a bunch of PDP-11's and VAXen. Also a bunch of
APPLE ]['s and Tandy computers. And I almost forgot all my 3B1's. One
of these days I hope to actually set up amd operate a computer museum.

O.K. List time:

1) Altair 680b (raised from a kit). This was the Motorla 6800
CPU version, not the Altair 8800 which used the Intel 8080.

1.5) Technico single-board-computer build on the TI 9800 16-bit CPU.
Never did anything serious with that. Couldn't afford the extra
memory and disk interface for it at the time.

2) SWTP 6800 (SSB DOS-68 quite a few versions as it matured.

3) SWTP 6809 (SSB DOS-69 and OS-9)

4) Cosmos CMS-16/UNX (v7 unix -- Unisoft port with a deadly
inefficient C compiler. It thought that it was dealing with a
PDP-11, and if the PDP-11 didn't have the instruction, it didn't
use it. (The exception were the LINK and ULINK instructions for
creating and destroying a stack frame.)

Eventually was running two Fujitsu 2312K (84 MB 8" SMD interface
drives).

5) AT&T 7300/3B1 family (several over time)

6) Tektronix 6130 (total of two over time)

7) Sun 2/120 (10 MHz 68010)

8) Sun 3/140 (25 MHZ 68020 I think.)

9) Several other Sun3 machines, but never a Sun3X (68030)

9.5) Intergraph Interact 32C

10 SS1+ clone (OPUS)

11 Several Sun SS-2 machines.

12) Sun SS-10

13) Sun SS-5 (two still in service)

14) Sun SS-20

15) Sun Ultra-1

16) Sun Ultra-2s

17) Sun Ultra 60

18) Sun Ultra-5

19) Sun Ultra-10s (currently web servers)

20 Sun Fire 280R

21 Sun Blade 1000 & Sun Blade 2000 machines.

22 Mac Mini (Intel based)

23 ... Not counting the various MS-DOS and Windows machines over time.

I've mostly only listed the machines which I've actually used
for one thing or another.

[ ... ]

But -- the 3B2 was the porting base for unix for some time. (I
guess that the higher numbered 3B* systems were a fairly easy port from
the 3B2 software.

They maintained very good compatability along the whole line. But then,
they had to, they were running the phone system with them and that was
their bread and butter.

I wonder what they are using today?

And I've still got (but have retired) my first unix box, a
COSMOS CMS16/UNX (Motorola 8 MHz 68000 CPU with v7 unix in an Intel
Multibus chassis.) *And* -- I still have the manuals and the 11 8" DSDD
floppies which made the OS distribution.

My first Unix system was a pre-release Tandy Model 16. I got it when
I was working for Martin Marietta and we were trying to sell a certain
government site on replacing Terak 8510's running UCSD Pascal with
something a bit more business practical. I started this project while
I was in the Army and then worked it from the other side when I got out
and became a contractor. In the end, I got to keep the original machine
we had acquired from Tandy before they started selling them.

Hmm ... The Tandy model 16 was a 68000 based system IIRC. I
wonder who did the port of unix to that one?

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.

Did you ever hear of the PDP-11 which ran unix from a DECTAPE?
Swapping and everything on that one tape drive. :-)

No. And I can't imagine swapping to a DECTAPE at all.

It did it! It was slow (of course), but it was mostly a
proof-of-principle thing. :-)

But, I do know
there is a version of mini-Unix that runs on the TERAK 8510. LSI-11/02,
28K Words of memory and an 8" floppy. :-) There was a time when Unix
was not nearly as bloated as it later became.

O.K I have the LSI-11 two-wide card cage full of cards
(including the floppy interface) and a single matching floppy drive to
build one.

I also have a Bridgeport BOSS-3 CNC mill with a serious case of
electronics Altzheimer's built on a quad-wide LSI-11. That is coming
out, and being replaced with a linux-based EMC package.

Enjoy,
DoN.

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