Hardware free to a good home

Hardware free to a good home

[Michael Sokolov]

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

I have got some hardware I have to get rid of by the end of February, and it's
free to any of you guys if you are willing to come and pick it up in Cleveland,
Ohio, USA.

Last November I received a load of equipment from one company here in
Cleveland. It was a complicated network of CPUs and peripherals of all makes
and models put together by Xerox and intended to be used as a dedicated
document processing system. The CPUs included one VAX, three unidentifiable
towers, and a bunch of PCs. I'm using the VAX and all disk and tape drives
myself for my own purposes, and I'm selling the PCs, but still I've got those
three unidentifiable towers and three very funky monitors that were attached to
them. There is also a very funky laser printer attached to one of them. Given
that the VAX and all disk and tape drives have been taken out of the equation,
it's unlikely that the rest of the stuff can still be used for that dedicated
document processing whatever thing, but the towers have some apparently generic
controller boards in them (VME or something like that) and other parts that can
be raided for. Who knows, maybe even the CPUs are standard (probably some 68K),
in which case someone who knows more about this than I do (NULL) may be able to
actually use these machines for something.

The only identification on this equipment are the Xerox model numbers. One of
the towers was called NS8090 File Server. It had an external SCSI hard disk and
an Exabyte tape drive, but I've reused these for my own purposes. The other two
towers were called 6085 workstations, and they were diskless from the beginning
(as far as I can tell they don't have any mass storage controllers). All three
have monitors with very funny connectors. Aside from the Xerox model numbers
which tell me absolutely nothing, there are no hints whatsoever as to what the
CPU architecture is and all that. All towers have AUI Ethernet ports.

The laser printer is called NS8000 Laser CP, and it was attached to the tower
that was called the NS8090 File Server. The connectors are 25-pin like the
serial and parallel ones, but they have slide locks like on AUI. These slide
locks and the fact that the printer was apparently never intended to be
connected to anything except an "NS8090 File Server" suggest that the printer's
interface is not parallel or serial, but something very funny.

It has been suggested to me that I take the boxes apart, ID as many boards as
possible, and try to sell/donate them to whoever finds them useful (and the
cabinets and such would probably have to be scrapped). However, the thing is,
I don't really have time for all this, and it's naive to think that any of this
stuff has any significant cash value.

Right now I'm in the process of moving to another (cheaper) apartment in
another part of Cleveland, and really don't feel like hauling that junk around
with me. I have got these three CPU towers, three monitors, and one laser
printer, all absolutely unidentifiable, that I have to get rid of. Given what a
great job I've done at identifying and describing this stuff, it would be naive
for me to expect to sell it. Therefore, I'm giving it away for free to anyone
who is willing to come and pick it up. I have to vacate this apartment by the
end of February, and if no one picks this stuff up, I will have no choice but
to throw it in the big dumpster, which would be a great pity if this stuff is
actually useful for something.

Once again, I'm in Cleveland, Ohio, USA.

Michael Sokolov
TUHS 4BSD Coordinator
4.3BSD-* Maintainer
Quasijarus Project Principal Architect & Developer
Phone: 440-449-0299 or 216-217-2579
ARPA Internet SMTP mail: mxs46 at k2.scl.cwru.edu
TUHS WWW page: http://minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au/TUHS/
Quasijarus WWW page: http://minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au/Quasijarus/

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From: Ken Wellsch <kcwellsc@math.uwaterloo.ca>
Message-Id: <199902021452.JAA29320 at math.uwaterloo.ca>
Subject: Re: Old UNIX file system formats
To: erin at coffee.corliss.net (Erin W. Corliss)
Date: Tue, 2 Feb 1999 09:52:35 -0500 (EST)
Cc: norman at nose.cita.utoronto.ca, pups at minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.3.96.990201095832.20104A-100000 at coffee.corliss.net> from "Erin W. Corliss" at Feb 1, 99 10:01:14 am
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I shouldn't have posted without doing the proper research.  I took a
gander at PUPS/Tools/Filesys/traverse.c.gz which I'm quite sure is one
of the tools I wrote when I was finally able to figure out the contents
of that V6 tape I had (also with no docs - it was such irony to look
at the setup document on the tape *after* figuring the format out that
clearly describes the block layout 8-).  I notice traverse.c.gz does
indeed use the LARG flag, not HUGE.  Since few care, I'll not bother
extracting enough of Venix 1.x to see whether that is where I met the
HUGE flag or it is just my faulty memory...  -- Ken

| From owner-pups at minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au  Mon Feb  1 13:06:04 1999
| 
| Hmm...  I wrote a disk image editor in Visual Basic without knowing the
| specs for the filesystem -- I set it up so that if the 9th pointer is zero
| and the filesize is greater than one block, then it assumed the block
| pointed to by the 8th pointer was a list of blocks in the file.