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A nice haul...

C

commodorejohn

Veteran Member
Joined
Jul 6, 2010
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Location
California, USA
So there's an old couple at my church, and the husband is an old IT guy and computer hobbyist. They're going to be moving out-of-state in the not-too-distant future, and we got to talking and they offered to let me have his collection, which would save them the trouble of moving or getting rid of it. They came by yesterday afternoon with a pickup bed full of things:

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Three Osborne-1s,

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Two C64s,
Two VIC-20s,
One B128,
One Plus-4,
One XT,
One G3,

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One 128D,

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One Kaypro 2X,

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One Vector 4,

♫ And a partridge in a pear tree... ♪

(okay, not really.)

I also got an assortment of peripherals, displays, manuals, and software for all of the above, including a nifty-looking Kaypro-branded daisy-wheel printer. I haven't had nearly as much time to play with all of it as I'd like, on account of a hectic short-notice project at work, but the Kaypro at least is working fine, and everything seems to be in pretty great shape. The one issue I've encountered so far is that the Vector 4 doesn't want to boot off its internal hard disk - when I select "[W]inchester boot" from the boot menu, it accesses the disk and then drops right back to the boot menu. I'm not sure what the deal is here, or what I can do about it; I can't seem to find any system disks for it. I understand that some Vector 4s used a hard-sectored disk format and some used soft-sectored; is there a good way to tell which this is without having to pull the drive out and check?
 
If you have disks for the vector just check one to see if there is more than one index hole punched in the media (the jacket will only have one). Otherwise, not so easy.
 
I don't have any disks for the Vector at the moment. The guy I got it from says he has other miscellaneous disks hanging around the place, so I'll be getting those soon-ish; hopefully there's a set of system media for it in there somewhere. Oddly, I do have a set of disks for the Triumph-Adler Royal Alphatronic, despite his not apparently owning one...huh.
 
Well, I talked with the previous owner again this morning, and he says the Vector's floppy drive is hard-sectored. He doesn't think he has any floppies for it, either, so if there isn't some kind of monitor hidden in the ROM that I can use to load something over the serial port, I'm gonna have to track down a replacement set of disks somewhere or other...

Apparently, it was originally owned by the Duluth Transit Authority and was the first computer they had for scheduling.
 
In looking up some more details on the Vector 4, it apparently can run a bunch of different O/S.

Although primarily used with the CP/M operating system, it ran several others including OASIS, Micropolis Disk Operating System (MDOS), and Micropolis Z80 Operating System (MZOS).
Click to expand...

If you can't find disks, maybe you could create some using a more modern system and transfer to floppy. Or perhaps not if the format of the disks is wildly different.

Looks like it uses an unusual 100 track per inch 5.25" floppy drives and 16 sector hard sector media. Maybe an HXC emulator might do the trick.
 
Yeah, I'm really happy about the 128D - I've always wanted one, but I've never wanted one badly enough to shell out for the going rate. Between that (convenient form factor, expanded hardware) and the breadbox 64s (6581-model SID) I think I can probably justify finding a new home for my flat 128 :)

The B128 I'm curious to play around with. I can't think of much I'd use it for off the top of my head, but the IEEE-488 is intriguing and the RS-232 port isn't something you see too much of on Commodore 8-bitters...
 
Very bad ass :) Congrats on the find :) The b series Commodores I always thought were interesting and much less common in the US.
 
Still trying to get system disks lined up for the Vector 4, but I've heard from a guy who might have some, so hopefully I'll have it up before too long. Took a look inside this afternoon, and in addition to the disk controller card, it's got another Vector Graphics S100 card labeled "Sabrenet" - was this some proprietary networking protocol?
 
Well, happily, thanks to a guy on the Vector Graphic mailing list I now have the Vector 4 booting into CP/M off a freshly-formatted hard disk.I'm not quite out of the woods yet, though: with no other machines capable of writing hard-sectored floppies, my only way to get data onto and off of the machine is via RS-232, and there's no transfer software on the system disk. There's plenty of resources for bootstrapping some kind of serial transfer software onto a CP/M machine on the Internet, but that's still an issue since the only manual I have for the machine has precious little information about the serial ports. I can set the baud rate via the CONFIG utility, but there doesn't seem to be a way to change the character format, nor any information on what the default character format is. I'm not even entirely sure of what the device name for the modem port is.

Does anybody have any idea on any of this? I'd rather not have to try and hack up some ungodly clunky utility in MBASIC doing direct acess to the USART by hand, but I'm not sure how to get off the ground otherwise.
 
Very nice collection you picked up. I'm glad they went to a great home and hope you enjoy them for years to come.
 
No Kermit, no XModem, no nothin'. Luckily, I found a small assembly listing I might be able to type in that will receive XModem, and a guy on the Vector Graphic user group is sending me a disk with some comms utilities.
 
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