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Another recycle-center rescue...

commodorejohn

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I dropped by the local computer recycler again in search of interesting things, and I came across a little 386-era minitower. (I didn't even know minitowers were a thing at this point, but then I was a Mac kid at the time.) It caught my eye for a couple reasons, aside from the fact that I was looking to grab a 386 system: it had some kind of cassette tape drive installed, a DE9-to-DB25 dongle for the serial port, and a full-length four-port Ethernet (or possibly serial-over-Ethernet?) card with a giant breakout box on the outside of the case giving four RJ45 jacks. (Crazily enough, it looks like there's space on the board for another four 16550 UARTs and associated logic! I can only imagine that somewhere out there is a breakout box even larger - and this one's already about the size of a 3.5" floppy drive, just dangling off the back of the computer...) This was very clearly not your ordinary home DOS box.

I haven't had a chance to fully investigate yet (it won't boot, as the CMOS battery is dead,) but the tape drive is hooked to an Everex controller card. According to Wikipedia Everex not only made tape-backup systems, but also file-server software and a version of Unix; given the monster network card and the serial cable (for hooking to an admin terminal?) I'm wondering if this wasn't the central server for someone's business LAN, back in the day. I was lucky in that the recycle-center folks forgot to remove the hard drive, as they customarily do, so I have the full system on hand; I'm looking forward to drive-spelunking if I can get it booting into whatever's currently installed on it.

The system itself doesn't look to be at all bad, either; it's based on this baby AT board, with a 33MHz Chips & Technologies Super 386 installed and some amount of cache (not sure what yet.) A maximum of 32MB RAM for a 386 is certainly nothing to sneeze at... It also came with this video card; a 1024x768 display in a 386-era system reinforces my theory that this is a Unix system...

So anyway, I've got a new battery on the way, and I'll post updates as I see if I can't work out what culture this artifact originated from and what significance it held there ;)
 
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I cant wait to see them. ^.^
 

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It will be an interesting box though I suspect that it has 4 RS-422 ports not ethernet which was a common setup for scientific data recording.
 
I had some of those full length, 4 network connector cards, not sure what they were or what I did with them.
 
Okay, found the mega-board: it's this 4-port serial controller. The left four UART sockets are populated; the other four are bare board. Turns out you can daisy-chain up to four of these things (or the eight-port equivalent) for up to thirty-two serial ports...yow. The tape drive connects to an Everex EV-833 SCSI controller, which it seems isn't even on TULARC, but turns up some Google results elsewhere. The hard drive's a Seagate ST3120A (a whopping 107MB of space!) - it's AT-IDE, so even if I can't get the system to boot in its original configuration, I can image the drive if it's still functional.

Anyway! Pictures!
computeri.jpg

The computer. A little scuffed and dirty, but generally in pretty good shape. Plenty of dustbunnies inside, though; I'd bet it was on 24/7 for years and never got cleaned after it was decommissioned...

mobon.jpg

The motherboard. It's difficult to tell from the picture, but the cache has the tag socket and bank 0 populated, so it's either got 32KB or 128KB cache. Haven't checked what size SIMMs those are, yet.

bigassy.jpg

The Omega Board, for all your serial-port needs.

scsix.jpg

The Everex SCSI controller for the tape drive. If I knew more about it I'd scan it and submit the information to TULARC...

...

...what I hate most about my phone camera isn't the ridiculously low resolution, or the horrible graininess. It's the fact that it has a square CCD, crops it to portrait mode to fit the phone's screen as a viewfinder, crops it in landscape mode when taking the picture, and uses the level sensor to auto-rotate the crop direction so that I can't even adjust for this inanity myself.
 
Wow is that one fudgly machine, but the hardware in it is pretty nice! :D Good find! Towers became popular in the 386 era, I actually have a 286 as well that has a tower chassis. :)

Wonder if that tape drive was like my old wang that took cassette tapes. :eek:
 
Hmm, so I looked up the beep code it was making; if the various AMIBIOS guides out there are correct, one long plus eight short equals a video-adapter problem, but I've tried it with several known-good cards with no change. I hope the board isn't shot...
 
I don't care what everyone says about that case. I worked at a PC Builder back in the early 90's, and that was the case we used 90% of the time. I loved it (except for the occasional cut on the hand!)
 
When I was working in the IT department of a foreign bank, based in London, in the late 90's, we used this kind of board (and breakout box) for either a multi port RAS (Remote Access Service) machine for dial-in to the office network or for a software based FAX to email gateway.
 
Haha! I remember that case! My first PC clone was in that exact case. It was a 386. It got upgraded many times over the years - I still have the case, with some Pentium something or other in it, I think. It's been apart so many times that all the screw threads on the back are stripped out, so you have to use sheet metal screws now.

Great case. And yes, I cut myself on it a few times too. Heh.

-Ian
 
Made all us techs look like we were cutters. Same with my full tower, damn if that thing wouldn't slit ya on any part inside. My other tech friend was smart (or stubborn) enough to show me their shop trick with those systems which was sand paper to smooth down all the metal innards. That made the system much less of a pain to work on.
 
That looks almost identical to the 386 my sister had when I was 10....the machine responsible for me ever getting in interest in computers in the first place. Same case and same board, except hers only had 5MB of RAM, an 80MB HDD, DOS 5, and spent about 90% of it's time running Ultima VI and Monkey Island. AMT made that one.
 
Bet you $20 this thing was running a *nix of some sort and the Digiboard was used to hang serial terminals off it.

This thing might have been a "headless" server with no monitor, stuck in a cupboard somewhere and accessed only through terminal on a serial port. As well as *nix, there were other group-oriented OSs around such as OASIS and whatever Wang used for client-server office terminal farms. Everex might have started building systems on one of those before taking up Unix.

I'd try firing it up with a terminal (or emulated terminal like hyperterm) attached to serial port - the BIOS might be configured to look for a terminal rather than a monitor. Though that would be unusual if it is a standard AMI BIOS.

To get the system profile, hook the HDD up to a working system, run SysRescue or one of those toolkits, and see what you can find in the HDD directories - it should become clear what OS and/or filesystem is there and point to the way to further research.

Rick
 
Well, progress has been made. Trying for divide-and-conquer, I unplugged everything except the motherboard and video card - now it works, enough to give a picture and boot to the BIOS. I'm not sure yet, but I suspect that the power supply's just gotten old and couldn't cope with running all the board and drives at once anymore.

Turns out it has 1.6MB RAM - I'll have to beef that up a bit.
 
Success! The problem child was the multi-I/O card; I replaced that with a spare and it's now booting. It's a XENIX System V setup (good Lord, there was a time when you could run Unices in 1.6MB of RAM? Though I've dropped in some extra.) Bitches at me about the missing mega-serial card, even! Of course, now there's the problem of my not having the password, so I'll probably have to image it anyway, but it's still pretty neat to have this thing booting :)

(Now what I'd really like to know is how come it reports 7MB XMS + 640KB when according to the manual it only supports 256KB, 1MB, and 4MB SIMMs, and it passes the full memory tests so it's not a malfunction? Unless the 640KB isn't actually onboard and it's stealing 1MB out of 8MB for conventional memory...)
 
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