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Next Monday: The AT goes rackmount

NeXT

NeXT

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Joined
Oct 21, 2008
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Location
Kamloops, BC, Canada
This was a more of a spur-of-the-moment things. It gets me back to Seattle though and I can mess with my 35mm camera some more along the way.
Anyways, I got leads on an IBM 7552 Industrial Computer.
Quoting the Old Computer Hut...
The IBM Industrial Computer 7552 is a ruggedised PC, designed for for use in an industrial plant environment. The 7552 was based on the Intel 80286 processor, running at 10MHz and had 512KB of system memory as standard (expandable to 3MB).

The model was announced in July 1987 and initially, two variants were available, the 040 and the 140. The model 040 lacked any form of disk storage, while the 140 was fitted with a disk adaptor which was designed to accommodate a 3½ inch 720KB diskette drive and one or two 10MB hard disk drives (one drive was the usual option and the disk itself was an extra).

This machine is interesting because unlike the PC series, this is a bus-based machine. The bus is a little quirky as it combines the MicroChannel bus of the PS/2 series machines with a subset of the ISA peripheral bus and then adds a few 7552 signals in for good measure. The backplane has space for 9 modules (card shrouds). As the disk-drive module is double width, the model 140 can accommodate a total of 8 modules. A module can be plugged into any position in the bus but the standard arrangement was, from left to right; System Resource Card, Processor Card, 5 accessory cards or blank modules, double width Disk Assembly.
Click to expand...

I was even shown a picture of the system at the recycling center where it was spotted.

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It looks good. It's a Model 140 as it has the disk drive card (and if they pulled the drive I got PILES of those funky drives IBM had with the single edge connector) and there's manuals!
I was looking for a system to run alongside my weird dual pertec drive system I was building and this will fit the bill perfectly and I can then hang off it even cooler things like an IBM modem and possibly a terminal controller (I got a twinax one handy but have no idea if you can actually hang that off a PC and use it). You could make some sort of really weird and dated system off all this, complete with spinny tape drives! 8-)

More pictures will be available when I get it back to CelGen HQ. I didn't even know such a system existed until now.
 
Is this thing complete? It looks as if there should be some sort of door or cover over the black area (where the metal shears are sitting).

I like rackmount cases a lot--put some feet on the bottom of one and you get a nice easy-to-access system with filtered air circulation that's easy to access and built like a tank.
 
I have no additional information on the system other than what I see is what I get.
I'm hoping it at least has an ISA module installed, oterwise I'll have to poke around on the backplane had make my own ISA adapters as seeing from a picture here it's pretty straightforward.
 
I have to admit, I'd love to see inside that monster. I'm always on the lookout for very large computers like that. I've always wanted to make my own home automation / HAL setup...
 
Definatly one of those "I want it" followed by "now what am I going to do with it" systems.
For $20 you can't go wrong, looks heavy.
 
It's here and it's in a lot more impressive condition than I thought.

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It was apparently shipped to Intermec Systems. This particular unnit was made in 1987. The hardware for a rack was included.
Everything in the thing is modular down to the power supply. it all runs off a single dumb backplane.
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There is absolutely no Microchannel in this thing at all. It's totally ISA based.

There are five distinct modules in the system.

I/O
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CPU (80286 + 287)
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Ram
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Well that explains why you could only do 3mb per module, it's so mad proprietary.....

ISA
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Seriously, it just adapts the lines on the backplane to an ISA slot. There is no magic going on in here and I got THREE of these adapters with room for one more.

Disk
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You option was for either a 20 or 40mb MFM drive it seems and you could support up to two of them.

There was also more stuff too it seems.
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I have three (two still shrinkwrapped) boxes of the communications subsystem (remote management?) software, two copies of the manuals (and diagnostics diskettes), a Magtek card reader and a barcode wand whose rubber boot has turned into an impossible to remove black sludge which is all over my hands now. >_>
It also powers up. The momentary outage battery is long dead and I'm missing the keyboard (and it's not a regular AT connector) and I can't find the key (It DID come with it but it seems it was misplaced.....) but it's currently set to the "run" position. Still, it reaches "00" which according to the manual means the system has passed all tests and is ready to operate.

Now I need to do the fun part and make a cabinet to hold it and my two tape drives.

It did cost a little mroe in the end ($35) but damn, it was still damn worth it. It's in excellent shape.
 
That is just awesome looking... I took a few minutes to plug some numbers into google from the memory chips and lets just say, they came up with NOTHING. I would assume that any sort of memory upgrade is going to be hard to find and if the person knows what they have, expensive...
 
The memory looks like the metal tin cans found in proprietary IBM PS/2 model 80 RAM cards, will go look.

23 pin keyed RAM made by IBM (square cans 5 x 5 pin pattern missing 2 pins) looks just like the chips you have except there are soldered on so the leads are cut. Must be a few different densities since I just looked at 2 x 1MB RAM boards, one having 18 chips the other just 12 and I know cards were made with 2MB or maybe 4MB max.
 
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