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Wanted: AT&T 3B2 / 3B1 / UnixPC / 7300

S

Securix

Experienced Member
Joined
Oct 7, 2009
Messages
196
Location
New Joizey, USA
Hi all,

Figure it's time to post my semi-annual appeal for 3B stuff.

If anyone has (or knows anyone who has) 3B2 or 3B1/UnixPC/7300 machines, parts, accessories, etc, please let me know.

Thanks!
 
I thought I might resurrect this old thread, just by saying that I now have the same request.

If anyone has (or knows anyone who has) 3B2 or 3B1/UnixPC/7300 machines, parts, accessories, etc, please let me know.

I am rebuilding/reconstructing my first 7300 now, and a few things are still missing, like a mouse and keyboard cord, and any OS/software install disks.

I have created a highly-detailed blog post on this reconstruction project:

http://bit.ly/1mpHKvU

Thanks to all here!
-AJ
http://MightyFrame.com
 
Hey Chuck(G), just wanted to give you an update and say thanks again...I got ahold of Cindy and she was very helpful. She says she had a mostly complete 7300, missing only the keyboard, just as you indicated.

The system is untested.

We arranged for her to ship the whole thing to me, and it should arrive sometime mid next week.

I'll post and update here after I receive it.

Thanks again!
-AJ
 
Talking with her, I think she mentioned that she has/had most of a 3B2.

For me, it was easier to solve my problem by writing a utility to handle the peculiarities of the Convergent mods to the SysV filesystem. What was interesting is that modern gzip still handles the old .Z files just fine. Hardware brevis, software longa.
 
Chuck(G),

I just wanted to update and say thanks again.

Cindy shipped the AT&T 7300 UNIX PC. It arrived in wonderful condition, and after some careful manipulation, I actually was able to get the machine to boot up, after plugging in the missing keyboard, since I had one from my previous unsuccessful 7300 reconstruct process.

At first, the hard drive would not spin. To get it to boot, I had to take the cover off, plug a standard 5v/12v connector from a modern ATX power supply into the hard drive, and it started right up. After that I plugged the original power connector back into the hard drive, and the system booted just fine from its own power supply.

If you are interested, you can see it here:

http://bit.ly/1mojKGl

Thanks again!

By the way, you say "solve my problem by writing a utility to handle the peculiarities of the Convergent mods to the SysV filesystem. "

This is fascinating...did you happen to keep any of your work/files on this? Without being able to find any available CTIX install tape, I may need to learn how to do exactly this to get our MightyFrames to boot on SysV.

-AJ
 
AJ, congratulations--and happy to help.

Since I was working with both 8 and 10 sector floppies with the SysV filesystem on them, I needed some information about exactly what Convergent did. I stumbled across the development floppy images here. I just concatenated the images using cat, then used cpio to extract the files. Worked just fine and I found a bundle of information on what was going on in the include/sys files--at least enough to puzzle out how the filesystem was being deployed. It seems to be a standard SysV filesystem, with a few Convergent peculiarities--but nothing really weird.

Once I had that information, the extraction of the floppy data went very smoothly and I was able to supply my customer with a complete directory tree of work he'd done in 1983. He was very pleased.
 
Chuck(G),

I am now also looking at the development floppy images you refer to above. Would you be able to give me some basic instruction on how to create the floppy disks from these images, such as a particular utility or procedure?

Thanks,
-AJ
 
I believe that these images were done by simply treating the floppy device as a tape--i.e., there's no boot sector. The data was transfered using cpio.

If you're just after the files, the simplest thing is to simply cat the fioppy images together and run cpio on the result to extract the files. Cpio is an ancient utility that hasn't changed much over the years, so even a modern 64 bit Linux will do the job.

If you really want to recreate the floppies, you'll have to format some 10-sector disks and then copy (i.e. dd) the images to them. I don't think 10 sector DSDD is standard on any relatively modern platform, so you'll probably end up doing this on your 3B1, unless you can coax a modern Linux distro to do it--I haven't tried; I just went with the first method.
 
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