dreddnott
Experienced Member
This is the one I described in the Warehouse updates thread in the Your Collections forum.
Tragically, the 5153 color monitor was destroyed on Monday, the one day I wasn't there to stop them.
The rest of the system made it upstairs fine, and I set it up to display composite output on a rather small Viewsonic prototype LCD TV. Looks quite charming.
It boots DOS 2.10, doesn't know the time or date, and won't take a current date (or maybe I'm entering it in the wrong format). Y2K issues?
The Tallgrass Technologies hardfile/tape drive apparently has three hard drives or some bizarre low-level partitioning scheme: drive letters C, D, E, and F all have data on them. C is the internal IBM drive (might be 10MB, might be more), D is 15MB, and E and F are both 10MB.
They show up in the custom TG BIOS as three separate drives, and not in FDISK at all (weird), but I'm not 100% sure. It's large, and probably long enough to hold 3 3.5" HDDs, but these were not common in 1983, or thereabouts. The system would not boot without the TG hardfile attached (it requires a 25-pin cable that's female on both ends, probably SCSI).
I'm pretty sure the whole shebang dates to fairly early in the production timeline of the XT - a lot of the file modification dates are quite old, although I found one or two rogue files from the early 1990s.
No games that I could see, but I didn't finish exploring all four drives. It has DOMS, Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect 4.1, Cougar (CMS), and a bunch of other mysterious thingums. There's a folder on one drive that contains three or four database files that are several megabytes each(!), but I'm not 100% sure what they actually contain.
I'll do more exploring tomorrow, and possibly rescue the entire system from the evil clutches of trueCycle if I can.
I don't have pictures yet. I'll try to remember to bring my real digital camera to work tomorrow!
P.S.: when it runs the memory check, it claims to have 320KB, not sure how it's organised inside - I'm still afraid to crack it open.
Tragically, the 5153 color monitor was destroyed on Monday, the one day I wasn't there to stop them.
The rest of the system made it upstairs fine, and I set it up to display composite output on a rather small Viewsonic prototype LCD TV. Looks quite charming.
It boots DOS 2.10, doesn't know the time or date, and won't take a current date (or maybe I'm entering it in the wrong format). Y2K issues?
The Tallgrass Technologies hardfile/tape drive apparently has three hard drives or some bizarre low-level partitioning scheme: drive letters C, D, E, and F all have data on them. C is the internal IBM drive (might be 10MB, might be more), D is 15MB, and E and F are both 10MB.
They show up in the custom TG BIOS as three separate drives, and not in FDISK at all (weird), but I'm not 100% sure. It's large, and probably long enough to hold 3 3.5" HDDs, but these were not common in 1983, or thereabouts. The system would not boot without the TG hardfile attached (it requires a 25-pin cable that's female on both ends, probably SCSI).
I'm pretty sure the whole shebang dates to fairly early in the production timeline of the XT - a lot of the file modification dates are quite old, although I found one or two rogue files from the early 1990s.
No games that I could see, but I didn't finish exploring all four drives. It has DOMS, Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect 4.1, Cougar (CMS), and a bunch of other mysterious thingums. There's a folder on one drive that contains three or four database files that are several megabytes each(!), but I'm not 100% sure what they actually contain.
I'll do more exploring tomorrow, and possibly rescue the entire system from the evil clutches of trueCycle if I can.
I don't have pictures yet. I'll try to remember to bring my real digital camera to work tomorrow!
P.S.: when it runs the memory check, it claims to have 320KB, not sure how it's organised inside - I'm still afraid to crack it open.
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