######### ######### ######## ######## ######## ######### ######### ######### ######### ######## ######## ######## ######### ######### ###### # #### ### ######## ### ### ### ### ######### #### ### ###### # #### ### ######## ### ### ### ### ######### #### ### ## # ######### # # ######## ## ## ## ## #### ### # # #### ### # # ### ### ## ## # # ## #### ### # ### # #### ### # ## # ### ### ### ### #### ## #### ### # ## # #### ### # ## # ### ### ### ### # ## ## #### ### # # #### ### # # ### ### ### ## # ## #### ### ### # # #### ### ### # ### ### #### ## ## # ## #### ### ######### ######### # ## ######## ######## ######### ######### ######### ######### ######## ######## ######## ######### ######### ===========-/\/-[ D I G I T A L D R E A M Z ]-\/\/-================= [ I. ACQUISITION ] I recently acquired a DECstation 5000/200. I had spotted it on ebay, and as it turns out, the person was local to my area, and has an entire warehouse full of old Digital Corp. stuff! He explained they were in business back when DEC was still around, and are to this day still selling DEC gear to an existing customer base. Since then they also started selling medical hardware for supplemental income. We didn't talk very long, as I knew he had an errand to run when I went to go pick up the machine, but interestingly, he also remarked that they sold new computer gear for a while, but the old retro gear was actually selling better, so they pivoted into medical equipment. I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise that retrocomputing is bigger than contemporary computing, since modern commodity hardware is not particularly built with longevity in mind, and is otherwise mostly unremarkable. [ II. HISTORY ] If you're not familiar with them, DECstations were released around the same time as the more widely known VAXstation. While VAXstations could run both OpenVMS and Ultrix, they were more widely used with VMS typically, where-as DECstations never ran VMS. They were purely intended as UNIX workstations, and as-such only initially shipped with ULTRIX as an operating sytem option, with OSF/1 later added as an alternative. As it turns out, ULTRIX is a BSD! [ II. PERIPHERALS ] The deal was for just the machine, but I was able to get him to also give me a keyboard with the required keyboard/mouse splitter cable. That's kind of important, because these machines have none of the standard peripheral connectors you'd expect. You can't just plug a PS2 or AT keyboard into these things, let alone a regular ps2 or serial mouse. Nor is there a VGA connector for the monitor. Haven been given a keyboard and keyboard/mouse splitter cable saved me the trouble of having to figure that out at least, but I did not have a monitor cable. The decstation 5000/200 has a 3W3-3BNC connector for monitor output. Cables which convert this to VGA exist, but the only one I found on ebay was selling for several hundred dollars. No way. I did find a cable that breaks out the 3W3 connector to 3 regular female BNC connector, so I went and got that instead. Then I found a cheap-o cable elsewhere, that does BNC to VGA, typically used with CCTV equipment. I hooked that into a monitor with sync-on-green, and lo and behold, we had visual! I still feel like I kind of lucked out here, because that could have been a lot more complicated. The DECstation does not have any internal storage. No hard drives, no floppies, nothing. It does have 2 SCSI connectors on the back, and originally they sold a "Storage expansion" box, with a HD that you could hook up to your DECstation over SCSI. That box was the same size as the computer itself (No really, it used the same case, it looks like?!) -- I used a regular-sized external scsi hard drive enclosure, and that seemed to work fine. I was also able to order a suitable DEC mouse for this system for relatively cheap thankfully, so that took care of that as well. Interestingly, these had some very odd puck mice available, with pressure 'nibs' on the bottom to detect movement instead of the classical ball. I did get a puck mouse, but it came with a normal ball, somewhat dissapointingly, but whatever works! [ III. ULTRIX INSTALL ] Okay, got video, keyboard, rodent, and storage sorted. So now to get an OS on the thing. I figured that'd be a breeze, but of course, I was very wrong. I hooked up an external SCSI cdrom drive to the SCSI bus, and it was able to recognize the drive and load the ULTRIX installer, so off to the races, I thought? NOPE - After choosing the basic or advanced installation option from the installer menu, the installer would bail and crash with a CAM error, mentioning the SCSI bus ID corresponding to the cdrom drive I was installing from. After lots of trial and error, online research, and banging my head against my desk, it turns out ULTRIX is <extremely> picky about the type of CDROM drive you use. These things were released at a time when CD drives were relatively new, and not particularly ubiquious. According to one source, they required drives which read in 512 byte sectors like a hard drive, instead of the standard 2352 bytes of a contemporary cd drive. I tried several drives, even ordered a drive capable of 512 byte sector output, but NONE worked. I had to give up on the idea of installing from CDROM and instead install from one hard drive to another. Unfortunately I did not, at the time have another SCSI hd enclosure, or enough parts to make one so I had to wait on more parts. Then, when I did get the additional enclosure, I had to figure out how to get the installer image on there. The only other machines I had with SCSI ports are my SGI Irix boxen (An octane and an indigo2) -- I was able to detect the drive from IRIX but IRIX does not let you write to sector zero of a drive. It seems, for a device to even get a device node, it must have a volume header. And you can't then write to the beginning of the disk or you blow away the volume header. Weird chicken-egg problem there. And here I thought I was a dd copy away from victory. Thus I ordered a PCI-E SCSI controller card to stick in my modern PC. Unfortunately when it arrived, it seems it had the wrong connector type (A VHDCI plug instead of a HD68 or HD50) for which I did not have a converter cable for, and worse, my machine wouldn't even recognise the card in `lspci` -- sigh. -- Ordered ANOTHER card of older vintage with the right connector. But this was a PCI card. My modern PC has no PCI slots. But no problem, I thought, I have plentry of retro machines.. Yeah... so,... I have a Pentium 200MHz MMX machine - I popped the card in there. Now I needed an OS with drivers and dd copy available - so I did what any reasonable person would do, and popped in a GNU/ Linux install cd... and found out that i586 support in contemporary operating systems is near non-existent, especially on a pure MMX cpu - There was a few retro-linux distro's I could get running, but none of those had the drivers for the SCSI card. And the newer OSes which did have drivers, did not support the i586 CPU. -- I found out the hard way that there are many operating systems which CLAIM to support i386 or newer, or i486 or newer, but actually don't. Missing conditional-move (CMOV) instruction support was one issue. But there were other problems. One odd page I stumbled upon mentioned there can be instruction set incompatibilities in stuff written for pure MMX pentiums leading to problems not exhibited in both older and newer generations. Dunno! NO IDEA - whatever - Lucky me I guess. :) Eventually I remembered that the asterisk box running my phone system had some PCI slots, so when I popped the card in there, and was able to boot a modern linux, I was finally able to perform the dd copy onto the donor drive. Whew. All of this was a process that took several months. Installing from one hard drive to another got me passed the point the installer would crash at when installing from cd. I wasn't quite out of the woods yet, because after it rebooted from the target HDD and started the second stage of the installer, the ULTRIX installer crashed after trying to mkfs the partitions it just created. ULTRIX does not let you alter the partition layout during installation, and it instead uses a set of hardcoded partition sizes for the default set of system partitions, and then uses the "rest of the disk" for the /usr partition. As you can probably already guess, "the rest of the disk" being the problem here, as it's dumb enough to create a partition larger than the size it can handle (2G), resulting in seek errors during newfs invocation. Thankfully you can drop to a shell and manually resize the bad partition with chpt and then resume the installation. At the end of installation it asks if you want DECWindows MOTIF or DECWindows X11 - I picked MOTIF, as it's fancier, and eventually it dropped me into the familiar pretty DECWindows login screen. Unfortunately though, after logging in and being dropped into the desktop, things kinda broke. Trying to launch DECTerm would freeze it. I then re-did the entire install process again, and picked X11 instead, and now things work as expected. Maybe it does not have enough memory for handling DECWindows MOTIF? No idea, I'm just glad it all finally works! [ IV. EPILOGUE ] I will be bringing this machine to VCFMW this year so people can play with it. Speaking of which, I'm also working on my BBS again a bit in preparation for the show. Joe is going to set up a hunt group for me so I can bring a modem bank and support multiple concurrent dial-ins at the same time. Meanwhile, I'm still working on adding UTF-8 support so people can dial in with a regular linux terminal emulator instead of needing a dedicated BBS client that supports ANSI and CP437. I will also try to build some type of enclosure/box to hold all the USR modems together physically, with some cable mgmt done ahead of time, because last year turned into a horrid spaghetti nightmare. Lots of stuff to do, lets see how far I get! ;)