Re: 3B2 Disks

On 2009-01-15, Bill Gunshannon <billg999@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <slrngmtmo2.40g.dnichols@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"DoN. Nichols" <dnichols@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

[ ... ]

O.K. 67 MB full height was the largest that the 3B1 could
handle without modification. You could get a half-height Miniscribe
which would handle the same space, but had too many cylinders for the
WD1010 hard disk controller chip. Replace it with a WD2010 and you have
the ability to run the Miniscribe, so you could get 67 MB in a 7300
(half height drive bay) instead of requiring the 3B1 (full-height drive
bay).

I remember reading about this mod. But all my 3B1/UnixPC's (whichever one
didn't have the hump) are still pristine. And they all work, too.

The 7300 didn't have the hump, the 3B1 did. UnixPC applied to
both AFIK. (And prompted questions to unixpc.general before
comp.sys.3b1 came into being of the form:

"How can I run unix on my PC?"

This was one of the reasons that unixpc was not in the final comp.sys
newsgroup. :-)

[ ... ]

At that time there was no NNTP all of USENET was still UUCP.

At least I was using uucp go get mine -- from uunet before they
changed the modems used from Telebit TrailBlazers to something which was

I still have a pair of TrailBlazers in my collection.

As do I. (Actually, I think that one is a WorldBlazer.

[ ... ]

Ah yes -- the bang paths!

Remember the group mail.maps?

Yep! One of the advantages of using uunet was that I could use
a FQDN to both send and receive e-mail, though the first hop was uucp.
So I did try to bring up the maps package, but it cost too much
bandwidth to keep it updated, so I just used the domain names. IIRC, it
looked something like this:

ceilidh!uunet!username@FQDN


I keep trying to convince people that we really need to revive this email
system. It offers the best and quickest solution to the SPAM problem but
apparently I am the only one who can see that.

You know -- I think that would work! (Of course, it would bring
most uses of email to its knees given today's user base. :-)

And, the 3B2 had no TCPIP. Eventually
Woolongong did one but AT&T never did that I was aware of. That was
a Berkeley thing, not SYS V.

The 3B1 used the WillGoWrong TCP/IP package -- with certain
problems:

1) There was *no* ping -- because the kernel lacked the microtime
function needed for that to work.

2) A "ping -f" from a Sun 2/120 was enough to crash the system.


Do you remember when it was also the TCPIP package on VMS?

I never ran VMS -- or even accessed a machine running it. I've
got a friend who has been collecting VAXen in all sizes, and does run
VMS at home on one or two of the smaller ones. Not enough power to spin
up the larger ones, let alone not enough room. :-)

Of course,
I think they were also the ones who gave us "Eunice". :-)

Oh yes -- the only experience with "Eunice" that I have is the
comment from Larry Wall's "configure" script "Oh good! You're not
running Eunice." which told me that it must be pretty bad. :-)

[ ... ]

Yep! I was mostly only carrying comp.sys.3b1, comp.sources.3b1,
alt.folklore.computers, alt.folklore.urban, comp.unix.wizards, and a few
others -- but not much at uunet's connect time charges. :-)


Remember where UUNET came from?

I really never knew -- though I did know that they were local,
and even once visited them (before they moved) to pick up an Exabyte
tape of the sources tree.

UUNET seems to be dead, but ftp.uu.net still is out there -- it
just hasn't been updated in years.

I use it as the general target for ping or traceroute when I
have doubts about how my net connection is doing. :-)

I tried to sell the Tech Center people
here on the practicality of a business offering Email and News using
UUNET as my business case. This was before the first ISP or even the
INTERNET (outside of the University where I had been hired to set it up)
existed in NEPA. They could not see where anyone would be willing to
pay money for something like Email or News. :-(

Interesting. *I* certainly was willing to do so -- even while
working for an Army lab and getting access to Arpanet at the time.

[ ... ]

I doubt any businessman ever had a 3B2 "on his desk".

Nope -- not the 3B2 -- the 3B1. That is why it connected
between the phone line and the phone, and would dial calls for you --
and keep a record of how long your calls were to which numbers.

And the GUI was *supposed* to make it easier for Mr.
Businessman, at lest until it dumped him into "ed" on working on a file
he clicked on, with no documentation on how to get out of it.

Actually, I thought most of the desktop 3B1's had word processing software
on them. Wasn't there a very popular third party package for that?

Let me see ... "Wordmark Composer"? That was on one of the
machines that I got. And the floppy set and boxed manual set were with
it. It had been installed, but whoever never got a license key. I
wound up contacting them and getting one for free, as they were
considering it old product by then. Then I never really tried to use
it. I had troff and a LaserJet, so I didn't need it. :-)

It *did* make it easier to break into a system which you had
lost the password for. Log in as guest (by default no password), send
yourself some e-mail, then click on the mail icon when it popped up, and
bang out of the mail program to a root shell. :-)

Yeah, I remember that. Kind of like iPhones that all over the world have
the same root password. ;-)

Ouch! I don't have one. Do they even give you access to change
the password? Do they warn you that it should be changed.

[ ... ]

Actually, I can't imagine a businessman using a 3B2 at all. :-) But then,
that wasn't the target market.

But he *was* the target for the 3B1. Pretty raked styling, with
the floppy drive hiding behind the keyboard.

And still they couldn't make a sucess of them.

Except in the hardware and software hacker crowd after the "fire
sale". :-)

I even got the hardware reference manual for the 3B1 -- full
schematics and excellent documentation. I was rather tempted to go into
the box and replace the array of RAM chips with four 1Mx9 DIMMs -- so
there would be no need for any extra RAM in the COMBO cards. Just two
serial ports per card. :-)

[ ... ]

Yeah, I have a couple of QBUS M68K cards that would make great OS9-68K
machines. And, it's ROMable!!

I actually have such as set of Qbus cards too.

Integrated Solutions?

I don't know. The cards are out in /dev/barn01, with a lot of
stuff which I would need to move to reach them, and I don't have the
cage to plug them into.

Right now -- even if I had lights in that building -- I would
not go out. It is bloody cold out there right now, and I doubt that I
could touch anything without launching a static zap. Ask me in the
summertime when the head and humidity will just about kill me before I
dig that far back. :-)

If so, which PROMs? They had two. One booted a
version of Unix (which I have not been able to find) and the other was
MIKBUG (I think). Mine have the Unix boot PROMs. :-(

How do I tell? Especially without a card cage to run them in.

And with the 68K's address space, you could put the whole OS
including device drivers and device descriptors in ROM (except for
something which you were developing) and have plenty of address space
left for your applications.

Even on a SWTP 6809, with 56 K of RAM, and a lot of OS-9 in 4K
of EPROM there was enough room so my wife and I could use it as the same
time, as long as I avoided running a big Pascal compile, or used the
work processor (Stylo, IIRC.)

OS-9 was rather amazing that way. Imagine the looks on people's faces
when I demoed three people logged into a Tandy Color Computer with 1 floppy
and two serial ports (one bit banger and one UART based) and, of course,
the console. And, I hears it was possible to modify the RS232 PAK so
that with a MultiPAK interface you could even have two more serial
ports and support users on all of them. All with a 6809 and 64K of
memory.

Yep! And the later CoCos actually had 128K of RAM, and ran
Level-2 OS-9.

[ ... ]

While possible, based on my experience with who actually used 3B2's I
think it unlikely. While the machine (and CPU) had great promise they
were really pretty crippled, as delivered, unless you had lots of money.
And their lifetime was so short that even that didn't help by the time
most of them made it into the hands of people who would play with them.
Sad really.

The 3B1 became a true hacker's machine. I've only heard of a
few 3B2 machines in hobby hands.

Probably because without a supply of spare parts they ended out in the
dumpster like both of mine. NCR did a good job of destroying everything
as they did their "upgrades".

Ouch!

[ ... ]

Try what one friend encountered when bringing a big military
surplus transmitter home in the trunk of a car. He and his friend could
*barely* lift it -- but the car kept following it up, so getting it clear
of the trunk was a major problem. :-)

T-368? :-)

Probably. I don't remember the model, as I never saw it. I
only heard about it years later.

[ ... ]

Was Sun in business by then? They started with the 68K
processors.

Yeah, missed them in the list. And, I am sure a couple others. Siemans
and Bull were already making Unix boxes by this point and may have also
used M68K's. Of course, IBM had an M68K box as well. Target was labs.
This was before the PC or their RISC systems.

Wasn't Apollo in the 68K game too?

Yeah, forgot them on my list as well. And I even had one of them.

I wonder how many others we have missed between us?

My 1/120 had a 10 MHz 68010 (same as the 3B1, but BSD
flavor). I *think* that the original SUN had the 68000 plain vanilla,
like my Coamos CMS-16/UNX.

Yep. I know of a number of M68K Sun's still running.

I've got quite a few which *could* run, but the power versus
computron ratio says that I run the UltraSPARCs for most things. :-)

Speaking of SUN 3's..... Know anybody who might be interested in a pair
of Deskside pedestal model 3's?

Which ones? The three slot 3/140, or the 12 slot 3/[12]60?
I've got examples of both. And I can't find anyone who wants them.
Though I did find someone who wanted the two spare 2/120s and the two
sidecars with two 8" 168MB SMB drives in each. His car (a rental which
was headed back up to the Boston area) was really riding low when he
pulled away. :-)

I just checked and the Physics department
still has their but need to get rid of them real soon now before the move
to the new Science Building.

Hmm ... You know that they could be upgraded to SPARC based
systems with the 4/??? cards -- still use most of the existing cards,
except for the CPU card itself. And you could replace a lot of big RAM
boards with a single one full of 4Mx9 SIMMs.

Of course, I think that they could not run anything past perhaps
Solaris 2.6 -- if that far up the tree. :-)

Mine I was running SunOs 4.1.4 for a few years after the other
boxes started to get Solaris 2.x in them.

That's what the IBM PC was supposed to be, but that's another story.

That would have been an interesting twist to history. I wonder
where things would be if that had happened?

Well, for one thing, MS would likely have never got the stranglehold on
the industry they have.

Exactly. They didn't know where to steal an OS for the 68K. :-)

Actually, they already had M68K based desktop systems. Ran Unix.

And they could not imagine that a user would want unix, I guess. :-)

Or -- they couldn't make it into a closed system the way they
have with Windows. :-)

Now, if the PC had started with the 6809 and OS-9 it would have
been a *much* more attractive machine to me. :-)

6809 was already deadend technology by that point.

It was more powerful than the 8088 which the PC started with.
And it had as much a claim to being a 16-bit processor as the 8088 did. :-)


[ ... ]


If you are interested, I could pull out the quad LSI-11 card and
list the chips present -- especially if you could point me to any other
than the four 40-pin ones which might be important.

I sent a dual-wide LSI-11/02 to a guy out west and as far as I know it made
his work. I never saw a quad-wide 11/02. 11/03, yes, but not an 11/02.

I may be mis-remembering what it was called, as it did not have
any clear labeling on it. Wasn't the quad-wide the earlier CPU, and the
dual-wide was a later one? (By quad-wide, I mean four edge connectors,
if there is any doubt there.)

The card cage is weird. One slot for the LSI-11/02 with the
standard DEC connectors, and the rest are a totally different bus, unique
to the Bridgeport box. :-)

Didn't know that. I was always led to believe that the Bridgeport had a
complete, real PDP-11 in it with custom QBUS boards to interface to the
real machine. I have never actually seen one.

The only genuine DEC board was the quad-wide CPU. Everything
else was a wider card with totally different edge connectors, and my
machine (SN "CNC 103" (or was it "CNC 107"?) was supposed to be a very
early one, that they started with "CNC 100". In any case, the boards
were all wire wrap boards on that machine, but by the time the BOSS-5
version came out, all the boards were etched boards which fit in the
same bus.

Enjoy,
DoN.

--
Email: <dnichols@xxxxxxxxxxx> | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
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