Need Help ! 3B1 turn on but just show cursor at top-lefthand corner..

[Michael Ng]

I just own a 3B1 but new to 3B1 and I think it is a wonderful machine but when it is turned on it just show a cursor at the top lefthand corner (no flashing) and nothing else. No noise from HDD. When I put diagnostic disk in, it did boot and show the menu, when I run HDD test, it just displayed "Recal Disk" and just stuck.

I tried open the case and found the cables are plugged properly. Is it motherboard logic issue or HDD issue? It is a microscience 40MB model.

Hope someone can help to give idea..

THanks a lot
Michael

[Thad Floryan]

Hi Michael,

Googling "microscience 40MB disk" without the quotes finds a
lot of info which needs to be refined per the actual disk
drive part number.

The fact the diagnostic disks boots is good -- this means the
basic hardware of your 3B1 is intact and operational!

HOWEVER, your "No noise from HDD" and "Recal Disk" together
strongly suggest a stiction problem which plagued a LOT of
3B1 systems. Stiction (static friction) is a situation where
the disk heads, due to being parked near the center of the
platters, are held in position via a meniscus of platter lube
and it sometimes requires a dramatic step to get restarted:

Lifting the rear of the system about 2 to 3 inches off the
table and letting it drop suddenly.

I'm not kidding, and the above step worked for many people.

The worst case I "fixed" for one person was to operate the HD
outside of the chassis with the cover removed from the disk
and manually nudging the top platter with a pencil eraser to
break free of the platter lube meniscus and allow the disk to
spin up. Once the system started the owner did a backup, bought
a replacement disk, reinstalled the system files from floppies
and the backup and he was up and running again. The old disk
was tossed.

Some other 3B1 folks might have some other suggestions, but the
above is what I would do.

I wish you success.

Thad

[DoN. Nichols]

On 2013-03-27, Michael Ng <michae...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I just own a 3B1 but new to 3B1 and I think it is a wonderful machine
> but when it is turned on it just show a cursor at the top lefthand
> corner (no flashing) and nothing else. No noise from HDD. When I put
> diagnostic disk in, it did boot and show the menu, when I run HDD test,
> it just displayed "Recal Disk" and just stuck.

> I tried open the case and found the cables are plugged properly. Is it
> motherboard logic issue or HDD issue? It is a microscience 40MB model.

The first thing to do is to check the power supply connector.
There is a heavy duty ribbon cable arcing up from below the top metal
panel and connecting to the power supply. The pins tend to get oxidized
and high resistance and then start to overheat. Look for the following
signs:

1) The orange plastic is browned -- or even burnt though near one
pin.

2) The pin may have heated enough so the solder below the power
supply's printed circuit board may be crystalized from heat/cool
cycles. Clean the old solder off and flow fresh lead-tin solder
in its place.

Clean the pins and the inside of the connector with a good
contact cleaner (what used to be the material of choice was "Cramolin",
which got replaced by "De-Oxit" -- and it may have been replaced yet
again.


40 MB model -- is that a full-height drive or a half-height
drive? If the full-height, there is a separate power cable from the
power supply to the drive, but if a half-height drive, the power goes
though the ribbon cable and the system board. In that case the power
supply has one 12V pin dedicated to the disk, and one 5V one IIRC. And
this would be the most likely cause of what you are experiencing. The
drive is not even spinning up sounds like the power supply problems
above.

Good Luck,
DoN.

--
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[Michael Ng]

Hi Thad, DonN,

Thanks for your inputs, the HDD model is HH-1050 45MB, half height, yesterday I unplugged and replugged both the data cable and power cable but nothing happened then. This weekend I will try your methods.

By the way, did anyone try to use different storage media instead of the old MFM HDD? like flash memory? I wonder if another 10 years passed there will be no functional MFM HDD with capacity within the motherboard capability - someone said 3B1 cannot handle HDDs of very big capacity.

Regards,
Michael

[Thad Floryan]

On 3/28/2013 6:14 AM, Michael Ng wrote:
> [...]

> Hi Thad, DonN,
>
> Thanks for your inputs, the HDD model is HH-1050 45MB, half height,
> yesterday I unplugged and replugged both the data cable and power
> cable but nothing happened then. This weekend I will try your methods.
>
> By the way, did anyone try to use different storage media instead of
> the old MFM HDD? like flash memory? I wonder if another 10 years

> assed there will be no functional MFM HDD with capacity within the
> motherboard capability - someone said 3B1 cannot handle HDDs of very
> big capacity.

Hi Michael,

You're welcome!

Different storage media would require a different interface chip(s).

"Someone" designed/built/sold SCSI interface cards but SCSI drives
back then were expensive -- I paid US$2,500 for a Maxtor 380MB drive
for use on another system.

The stock 3B1 chip was, IIRC, a WD2010, and a WD2020 (or something
similar, I'd have to check my files out in my garage) would permit
both a larger HD and two (2) of them. I built several such setups
for local friends -- the board layouts were available l-o-n-g ago
and it would take me quite a while to find those I had assuming I
still have them.

I found a large stock of the WD2020 (don't quote me on that part
number until I check my old records) chips and I arranged a group
buy here in comp.sys.3B1 ages ago and several hundred folks
participated in the group buy (noting I was and still am in what's
known as 'Silicon Valley').

The largest MFM HDs that could be handled were the Maxtor XT2190
which has a 190MB capacity, and two of those could be used on one
system with the adapter card and the WD2020 chip. One I did was for
Brian Rice whom many of you might remember; he worked for Convergent
which manufactured the 3B1s for AT&T.

FWIW, I still have some of those chips in several tubes if anyone
is interested. If not, I may simply donate them to the Computer
History Museum which is local to me:

http://www.computerhistory.org/

Thad

[DoN. Nichols]

On 2013-03-28, Michael Ng <michae...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thursday, March 28, 2013 5:14:34 AM UTC+8, DoN. Nichols wrote:
>> On 2013-03-27, Michael Ng <michae...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> > I just own a 3B1 but new to 3B1 and I think it is a wonderful machine
>>
>> > but when it is turned on it just show a cursor at the top lefthand

[ ... ]

>> 40 MB model -- is that a full-height drive or a half-height
>>
>> drive? If the full-height, there is a separate power cable from the
>>
>> power supply to the drive, but if a half-height drive, the power goes
>>
>> though the ribbon cable and the system board. In that case the power
>>
>> supply has one 12V pin dedicated to the disk, and one 5V one IIRC. And
>>
>> this would be the most likely cause of what you are experiencing. The
>>
>> drive is not even spinning up sounds like the power supply problems
>>
>> above.

[ ... ]

> Hi Thad, DonN,

> Thanks for your inputs, the HDD model is HH-1050 45MB, half height,
> yesterday I unplugged and replugged both the data cable and power cable
> but nothing happened then. This weekend I will try your methods.

O.K. If you have a multimeter -- what do you measure at the
drive's PS connector pins -- going in parallel to the wires while the
disk drive is connected?

Both black wires are common ground, red should be +5V +/- 0.25V
and yellow should be +12V -- I forget the tolerance -- likely also +/-
0.25V or perhaps +/- 0.50V. It is often helpful to use the other black
wire for convenient access, so you don't have two probes side by side
and getting in each others' way.

If the voltages are fine, then the stiction is the likely
problem. But with a half-height drive, your power is going through the
system board, and you may have burned pins at the power supply.

> By the way, did anyone try to use different storage media instead of
> the old MFM HDD? like flash memory?

There was no flash memory when these systems were new.

And to use them -- you would first have to create a special
interface, and then write special drivers, which would have to be
included in the ROM which handles booting unless you have a good MFM
disk to boot from. And to do this, you would need access to the source
code for the unix used. Not sure whether the copyright has fully
expired on that yet -- if you could find someone who still has it.
There used to be someone here who did have it, but could not get
permission to share it.

It also did not know how to use ESDI disks (the first step up
from MFM. It was all dependent on the Western Digital 1010 controller
chip.

> I wonder if another 10 years passed
> there will be no functional MFM HDD with capacity within the motherboard
> capability - someone said 3B1 cannot handle HDDs of very big capacity.

Two things limited the capacity of the MFM drives on the 3B1.

1) As supplied, it could not access cylinders beyond 1024 (IIRC).

This could be fixed by unplugging the WD-1010 hard disk
controller chip and replacing it with a WD-2010.

2) The number of head select wires (3) in the supplied system limited
the number of heads and surfaces to eight.

It was possible to modify the hardware (if you are good with a
soldering iron on logic boards) to add a forth head select wire,
bumping things to 16 heads/surfaces.

Without both of these, you were limited to 67 MB with a
full-height drive.

With the WD 2010 chip substitution, there was a MicroScience
half-height drive which could give you the same 67 MB.

With both fixes in -- you could couple in *two* 190 MB drives,
one was made by Maxtor, and the other by Priam. I have one of the
latter, and wired things up so both drives would live in an external
disk drive housing for the AT&T 3B2 line of computers (same color
scheme). This kept the heavy load of the disk drive off the internal
power supply. And I put the floppy tape in there too. With both drives
external, you could do this with the half-height case (7300, instead of
3B1).

Not at all sure where you could find a WD-2010 these days. I
got mine back then by picking up hard disk controller cards for PCs of
the period at hamfests (after making sure that the one in question had
the WD-2010. :-)

Someone in here had the only existing SCSI interface card for
the 3B1 - a prototype which never went into production. And that still
required you to boot from a MFM drive, load the SCSI driver, and then
use the extra disk. :-)

I guess that a USB interface could be built into a card for one
of the three slots in the back (perhaps shared with a dual RS-232 port
on the same card), and a run-time loadable device driver could be booted
from (again -- a still working MFM disk). Not sure whether you could
extend boot ROM with something on an expansion card. But you would
probably still need the source for the OS to do this.

One thing which I considered doing -- but never did -- was to
take one of the earlier 7300 machines with only 256K or 1MB of RAM on
the system board, stripping all of the RAM out, and making a
daughterboard to allow using four 1MB DIMMs to put the maximum memory on
the system board, freeing expansion slots for other things.

[Michael Ng]

Hi DoN, Thad,

Just want to update on the status of my 3B1 as I tried to follow your advices.

Tonight I opened the 3B1 and measure the voltages of the power supply, pin 1 and pin 4 are 5V and 12V respectively (both the plug and the solder joints on the HDD PCB and the LED lighted up when the system was powered on. Then I tried what I thought was a bold step by opening up the cover of the drive (I assumed the HDD was dead and no loss trying this) and used a pencil eraser to nudge the platter (did not contact with the data area) and put all plugs in again and powered on, still no spinning with cover opened. Then I put the cover back and took off the PCB to work from the other side of the HDD, I re-seat all connectors and "moved" the motor manually. AND finally I gave a gentle shock to the HDD with my hand and re-plugged the power cable. This time, the HDD started to spin when the system was powered on.

Then, without fixing the HDD to the upper metal platform, I put everything together and tried to turn on the system without the diagnostic disk and this time I saw "searching for the hard disk drive..... "!! The system loaded to login and after I type "install" and pressed enter it went into office environment. Thank you both for the advices and I can now start to explore 3B1!

Regards,
Michael

[Thad Floryan]

Hi Michael,

That's great news! Congratulations on the repair.

Thad

[DoN. Nichols]

On 2013-04-13, Michael Ng <michae...@gmail.com> wrote:

[ ... ]

> Hi DoN, Thad,

> Just want to update on the status of my 3B1 as I tried to follow your
> advices.

> Tonight I opened the 3B1 and measure the voltages of the power supply,
> pin 1 and pin 4 are 5V and 12V respectively (both the plug and the
> solder joints on the HDD PCB and the LED lighted up when the system was
> powered on. Then I tried what I thought was a bold step by opening up
> the cover of the drive (I assumed the HDD was dead and no loss trying
> this) and used a pencil eraser to nudge the platter (did not contact
> with the data area) and put all plugs in again and powered on, still no
> spinning with cover opened. Then I put the cover back and took off the
> PCB to work from the other side of the HDD, I re-seat all connectors and
> "moved" the motor manually. AND finally I gave a gentle shock to the HDD
> with my hand and re-plugged the power cable. This time, the HDD started
> to spin when the system was powered on.

Sounds like it was "stiction" then. Beware that will almost
certainly reappear when you power the disk down after some period of
running (and absent a perfect UPS, you *will* have the system power down
sooner or later.)

> Then, without fixing the HDD to the upper metal platform, I put
> everything together and tried to turn on the system without the
> diagnostic disk and this time I saw "searching for the hard disk
> drive..... "!! The system loaded to login and after I type "install" and
> pressed enter it went into office environment. Thank you both for the
> advices and I can now start to explore 3B1!

Ideally --- try to find another drive of the same size and
interface and do a fresh install on it. (Yes, I know, those can be hard
to find at all -- let alone in good working condition.) But if you can,
you will likely get alot more use out of the machine.

I found (at least on the boards which I had) that there were
enough spare circuits in some ICs, and at least a couple of spare 20-pin
pad patterns so it was possible to make the circuit mods without a
daughterboard -- and with a little tricky work carry out both data
cables in a single ribbon cable so both drives can be external to the
system -- better cooling and less load on the power supply and its
connector.)

If you don't have all the install floppys, another possibility
is to put in one of the modifications (wasn't it developed by you,
Thad?) to add a second disk and one with more cylinders and
platters/heads), and with an identical size drive, just use DD to copy
it all from one to the other. Likely the drive will hang up during the
time you are making the modifications, but you can start it again with
the nudge from below -- avoid taking the cover off if you can.

[Thad Floryan]

On 4/13/2013 8:35 PM, DoN. Nichols wrote:
> [...]

> If you don't have all the install floppys, another possibility
> is to put in one of the modifications (wasn't it developed by you,
> Thad?)

No, that wasn't my design -- I was designing data security computers
for Adalogic, Inc. back then (VP Engineering) using this chip:

http://thadlabs.com/PIX/MC6859_DES.jpg note the 1983 date code

but I did build several of the 2-disk interfaces incl. one for Brian
Rice (ex-Convergent) and someone else whose name I've forgotten. I
have a "knack" for soldering and I removed all the original RAM chips
from my main 3B1 and socketed the entire RAM area on the motherboard
while upgrading its RAM capacity since there is a limited number of
3B1 expansion slots (3) and I didn't have any of the expansion chasses
at that time.

> to add a second disk and one with more cylinders and
> platters/heads), and with an identical size drive, just use DD to copy
> it all from one to the other. Likely the drive will hang up during the
> time you are making the modifications, but you can start it again with
> the nudge from below -- avoid taking the cover off if you can.

Finding MFM drives (IDE?) is not going to be an easy chore and of course
there will be no warranty. :-) I'm still amazed my systems still boot
after all these years and the drives are very noisy, nothing like today's
HDs.

Thad

[Michael Ng]

Hi DoN, Thad,

Today, I run into another problem, that's the floppy disk drive..
It worked quite well when the HDD was still "dead" and it read diagnostic disk and boot disk (boot and asked for disk #3) without problem. Today, when I tried to display content of some other older disk and format new disk (10 sector HD 5.25" disk), error message keeps popping up saying the disks could not be read, not inserted well or protected. When I tried to cold boot using the diagnostic disk, there was only two # under the wording "searching for floppy disk" and the system quickly run straight to search for HDD and "**********" and booted to login screen.

Can you advise why the floppy would fail like this and how should I deal with that? It did try to read and LED lighted up during system boot but handed over to HDD in two "#". THere is also no response when I try to trigger "diagnostic disk" from administration menu of office environment..

By the way, as the MFM HDDs just become rare to find and unreliable to use for longer term, is there any way to prolong the life of 3B1 by modifying storage media to replace MFM small capacity HDD?


Thanks,
Michael

[DoN. Nichols]

On 2013-04-14, Thad Floryan <th...@thadlabs.com> wrote:
> On 4/13/2013 8:35 PM, DoN. Nichols wrote:
>> [...]
>> If you don't have all the install floppys, another possibility
>> is to put in one of the modifications (wasn't it developed by you,
>> Thad?)
>
> No, that wasn't my design -- I was designing data security computers
> for Adalogic, Inc. back then (VP Engineering) using this chip:
>
> http://thadlabs.com/PIX/MC6859_DES.jpg note the 1983 date code

O.K. I've never seen that chip before.

> but I did build several of the 2-disk interfaces incl. one for Brian
> Rice (ex-Convergent) and someone else whose name I've forgotten. I
> have a "knack" for soldering and I removed all the original RAM chips
> from my main 3B1 and socketed the entire RAM area on the motherboard
> while upgrading its RAM capacity since there is a limited number of
> 3B1 expansion slots (3) and I didn't have any of the expansion chasses
> at that time.

I kept being tempted to strip out all the RAM chips on the board
and wire in four 1Mx9 SIMMs to get the system's maximum memory (limited
by the memory management hardware, and the code in the OS to handle
that) all in the system board -- and make it run cooler at the same
time. :-) But I never got around to it.

>> to add a second disk and one with more cylinders and
>> platters/heads), and with an identical size drive, just use DD to copy
>> it all from one to the other. Likely the drive will hang up during the
>> time you are making the modifications, but you can start it again with
>> the nudge from below -- avoid taking the cover off if you can.
>
> Finding MFM drives (IDE?)

Certainly not IDE. These need to be the ST-506 interface, I
believe. One ribbon cable past both drives to carry command signals, and
a separate ribbon cable for data to/from each drive (though there were
enough unused wires in that cable so it was possible to flip it over and
use the wires counting from the other edge to carry both through a
single cable. (Or did I use a wider cable, and creatively split it to
carry both? I would have to open up the system so modified to find out
for sure.

> is not going to be an easy chore and of course
> there will be no warranty. :-) I'm still amazed my systems still boot
> after all these years and the drives are very noisy, nothing like today's
> HDs.

Right. One of the problems (in terms of noise) came from the
rotating ball contact on the bottom of the spindle and a spring-loaded
graphite contact from the circuit board to ground out the static charge
which might build up on th platters.

And actually -- aside from stiction -- most of the problems with
the drives in the 3B1 were data corruption caused by voltage spiking
from the power supply connections interrupting power during writes.
(During reds, it would just retry and get slower, but a write which was
interrupted could corrupt not just the data part of a sector, but also
the header which told it that the data was just coming up. At that
point, the only solution was (after fixing the power supply
connections) a full low-level format and rebuild from scratch. At least
the drive itself was still funtional, once it was re-formatted. :-)

Enjoy,

[DoN. Nichols]

On 2013-04-14, Michael Ng <michae...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sunday, April 14, 2013 3:42:26 PM UTC+8, Thad Floryan wrote:
>> On 4/13/2013 8:35 PM, DoN. Nichols wrote:

> Hi DoN, Thad,

> Today, I run into another problem, that's the floppy disk drive..
>
> It worked quite well when the HDD was still "dead" and it read
> diagnostic disk and boot disk (boot and asked for disk #3) without
> problem. Today, when I tried to display content of some other older disk
> and format new disk (10 sector HD 5.25" disk), error message keeps
> popping up saying the disks could not be read, not inserted well or
> protected.

You know how the drives were write protected, do you not? A
sticker over the notch in the side of the disk. Depending on the drives
involved, some black plastic labels were transparent enough to the IR
light from a LED/photodiode pair used to sense its presence, while the
paper ones, or the metalized ones were sufficiently opaque. The early
drives used a switch to sense the write-protect tab. (And, FWIW, the
presence of the tab was what enabled writing on the older 8" floppy
disks, and some diskettes came without the notch and you had to punch it
to write-protect the disk. :-)

Anyway -- another thing which can be a problem is dust buildup
in two photosensors -- both the write protect one, and the index one
(senses a hole near the hub as the disk rotates in the jacket).

Normally -- you don't notice a dust bunny blocking this one
until you try to format a diskette. It uses this as a clue where to lay
down the first sector in each track, and if it never sees a pulse, it
can't start to format. As far as I know -- it ignores the index pulses
when reading.

> When I tried to cold boot using the diagnostic disk, there
> was only two # under the wording "searching for floppy disk" and the
> system quickly run straight to search for HDD and "**********" and
> booted to login screen.

Open it back up and check the following:

1) Are the connectors on the drive fully seated?

2) Is there dust in the drive? If so, removing it and
blowing it out with compressed air may help. In particular,
look where the hole in the floppy is for the index hole, and
check in that area of the drive for accumulations of dust
blocking the LED and photodiode (one above the floppy, one below
it.

> Can you advise why the floppy would fail like this and how should I
> deal with that? It did try to read and LED lighted up during system boot
> but handed over to HDD in two "#". THere is also no response when I try
> to trigger "diagnostic disk" from administration menu of office
> environment..

The LED lighting says that at least some parts of the
control/data cable should be making connection -- and the four pin
power cable is also connected. So -- a connector which is not fully
seated (twisted so only one end is fully seated), or dust in the sensors
in the drive, since air is pulled through it as long as the computer's
fans are running.

Since it worked not that long ago, something like dust or the
connectors are the most likely options.

> By the way, as the MFM HDDs just become rare to find and unreliable to
> use for longer term, is there any way to prolong the life of 3B1 by
> modifying storage media to replace MFM small capacity HDD?

Anything else would require having the source to the OS, so you
could write a new device driver for something like a CF card or a USB
thumb drive or something similar. *And* -- it would also require having
the source code to the boot ROMs to modify them to also boot from the
same sort of device. The existing ROMs and OS use the WD1010 (or if
upgraded by a previous owner, the WD2010) to control the disk. If you
could find an alternative chip, which had the same pinout, and the same
instruction set -- you would still have to perform surgery on the system
logic board. I don't think that it will be a practical thing to attempt
-- especially without the source code mentioned above. And I speak as
someone who has done his own version of the two drive modification to
the system board.

At least the system and the drives are old enough so they should
not have the "electrolytics with the pirated formula electrolyte"
failures common in somewhat more recent equipment.

Good luck,

[Michael Ng]

Hi DonN

Today I opened the system again and cleaned the contacts of power cable and data cable and sensor and read head using contact cleaner and the floppy drive works again. Thanks.

By the way, I would like to make a copy of Unix 3.51 system disks, what type of 5.25" floppy disk should I use?

Regards,
Michael

[DoN. Nichols]

On 2013-04-20, Michael Ng <michae...@gmail.com> wrote:

[ ... ]

> Hi DonN

> Today I opened the system again and cleaned the contacts of power
> cable and data cable and sensor and read head using contact cleaner and
> the floppy drive works again. Thanks.

Great!

> By the way, I would like to make a copy of Unix 3.51 system disks,
> what type of 5.25" floppy disk should I use?

The standard ones (sold as 360K floppies) not the HD ones. The
drive and interface can't handle the HD ones.

But -- you will have to re-format each on the 3B1 before you use
it. They'll probably come formatted for the PC 360K format (9 sectors
per track). The boot and diagnostics disks have to be 8 sectors per
track, and most of the rest have to be 10 sectors per track. (The 8
sectors per track are set by the boot ROM, and once the OS kernel is
loaded, it can handle the 10 sectors per track to get more capacity
(400K per floppy, IIRC). An 8 sectors/track disk can't hold all the
data required by most of the distribution floppies.

Note -- it is possible to get certain 3.5" floppy drives and
jumper them so they will only use the low density settings and make
special floppies which can be used to install the OS with fewer
diskettes needed. It requires building images of the floppy set in an
otherwise empty directory, and then using cpio and a file which is part
of that set to cause the files to be added to the diskettes in the right
order. I've done that in the past, when I had one set up to select
between the standard floppy drive, a 720K 5.25" floppy drive, and one of
the 3.5" low density drives. Both the 3.5" and the 720K 5.25" ones have
80 tracks instead of the 40 tracks on the standard 5.25" -- but both may
be difficult to find these days. The 3.5" ones tend to be either HD as
the standard, or ED as a special -- and neither of these will work with
the controller in the 3B1.

Good Luck,

[tlvp]

On Sun, 14 Apr 2013 00:42:26 -0700, Thad Floryan wrote:

> ... incl. one for Brian
> Rice (ex-Convergent) and someone else whose name I've forgotten ...

A name floating up in my brain out of the mists of time: Brian Bottom?
Brian Botton? But I can't be sure ... . HTH. Cheers, -- tlvp
--
Avant de repondre, jeter la poubelle, SVP.

[Bill Gunshannon]

In article <slrnkn5ssl.j1...@katana.d-and-d.com>,

Not specific to the 3B1, but I have gotten into the habit of erasing
floppies with a strong magnet (I have a couple of the large bars that
were used to bias Textronix Cad Station Graphics Tablets) or a bulk
tape eraser like Radio Shack used to (don't know if they still do)
sell. Frequently disks that got errors or refused to format work
fine after that. Applies to formating on PC's as well.

bill


--
Bill Gunshannon | de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n. Three wolves
bill...@cs.scranton.edu | and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton |
Scranton, Pennsylvania | #include <std.disclaimer.h>

[Thad Floryan]

On 4/20/2013 1:11 PM, tlvp wrote:
> On Sun, 14 Apr 2013 00:42:26 -0700, Thad Floryan wrote:
>
>> ... incl. one for Brian
>> Rice (ex-Convergent) and someone else whose name I've forgotten ...
>
> A name floating up in my brain out of the mists of time: Brian Bottom?
> Brian Botton? But I can't be sure ... . HTH. Cheers, -- tlvp

Hmmm, that name "sort of" sounds familiar but a quick
online search found no match that made sense. I also
checked the IMDb because the name "sort of" sounded like
a movie actor whose name once appeared in some movie credits
but nothing matched there either.

Brian Rice was the guy for whom I built one of the disk
interfaces. When he left Convergent he went to work at
Kubota in Santa Clara CA. I visited him there several
times for lunch and he setup Kubota as another UUCP link
for my email: ...!kubota!thadlabs!thad was one of the
paths that would work along with this path per my records:

...!{decwrl,mips,kubota}!thadlabs!thad

and also this: ...!{sun,mips,decwrl}!thadlabs!thad

At another time this was also a valid path to me:

...!{decwrl,mips,fernwood}!btr!thad (or) th...@btr.com

I don't miss having to rebuild the uucp maps every week and
I've had 'thadlabs.com' since the mid-1990s which is now my
"permanent" home base though I've also had email addresses at
some long-term client and employer sites since then.

Thad

[tlvp]

On Sat, 20 Apr 2013 14:05:34 -0700, Thad Floryan wrote:

... [Brian Botton?] ...

> Hmmm, that name "sort of" sounds familiar but a quick
> online search found no match that made sense.

Heh ... my search found him in an archived part 2 of the 3b1 FAQ -- at

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/3b1-faq/part2/

-- with this:

> Subject: 9.0. Credits
>
> The following are just a few of the folks who made this list possible.
> Apologies to those who may have been missed.
>
> James Warner Adams <ad...@ucunix.san.uc.edu>
> Brad Bosch <br...@i88.isc.com>
> Brian Botton <bot...@iexist.att.com>
> ... [and many more, all snipped, sorry] ...

Didn't he work on a SCSI host adapter project at one point?

[Thad Floryan]

On 4/20/2013 4:58 PM, tlvp wrote:
> On Sat, 20 Apr 2013 14:05:34 -0700, Thad Floryan wrote:
>
> ... [Brian Botton?] ...
>
>> Hmmm, that name "sort of" sounds familiar but a quick
>> online search found no match that made sense.
>
> Heh ... my search found him in an archived part 2 of the
> 3b1 FAQ -- at
>
> http://www.faqs.org/faqs/3b1-faq/part2/

> [...]

> Didn't he work on a SCSI host adapter project at one point?

Aha! Your reference to Part2 prompted me to search Part1 using
grep and then with Emacs which found the following:

" [...]
" Subject: 2.5. What's MGR?
"
" MGR is an alternative windowing environment developed by Steve
" Uhler at Bellcore and ported to the UNIX PC by Brad Bosch and
" Brian Botton. The MGR windowing environment can replace the
" [...]
" hardware modification called the VIDPAL. The VIDPAL (developed
" by Brian Botton [...!att!iexist!botton]) is a daughterboard that
" sits sandwiched between the 68010 CPU and the motherboard and
" allows direct access to video memory from a user process.
" [...]

I never built one of those daughterboards and thus never had an
opportunity to "play" with MGR and that's why his name sounded
"sort of" familiar but I couldn't quickly place it.

FWIW, I have copies of the two-part 3B1 FAQ on one of my systems
and that's what I just now searched. I am VERY surprised a Google
(or other) search didn't find 'Brian Botton' in the FAQ since the
FAQ is posted about every month or so and Google normally finds
material in active newsgroups except alt.os.linux.ubuntu which it
doesn't archive which I presume is due to the idiocy, spam and
vulgarity in that alt group -- I have most of its posters in my
killfile so I don't see most of the junk there anymore except when
some moron or newbie replies to a killfiled idiot. :-)

Thad

[Thad Floryan]

On 4/20/2013 4:58 PM, tlvp wrote:

> On Sat, 20 Apr 2013 14:05:34 -0700, Thad Floryan wrote:

> [...]
> ... [Brian Botton?] ...
> [...]

> Didn't he work on a SCSI host adapter project at one point?

The last time you asked about SCSI for the 3B1 was (per a
quick search of my archived postings and replies):

On 5/28/2009 10:54 PM, tlvp wrote:

to which I replied at Tue, 16 Jun 2009 02:37:32 -0700
(copy'n'pasted):

On 5/28/2009 10:54 PM, tlvp wrote:
> [...]
> I remember someone "at work" on a SCSI HA for the 3b1 just before
> I wound up dropping c.s.3 for some years -- the same person who
> devised a PROM for adding HDs with more disks/sectors ? -- Thad
> (or Lenny Tropiano) might remember just who -- but it seemed not
> to be in the cards that this SCSI project would become realized.
> [...]

I "found" where my old archives are located, but getting that system booted
up and searching would be a PITA in the foreseeable future, so I searched
Google Groups' comp.sys.3b1 and found these (among many similar) postings:

June 7, 1992; Brian Waters:

Hmmm.. I have just starting using a 3b1, and think a SCSI card would be a
great addition to it. It would make adding drives much easier then playing
around with PALS etc, and you would be more likely to be easily able to take
the drives to other machines. Imagine a 600 Meg maneto-optical drive hooked
up to the 3b1 :). Maybe this could be done with one of the new parrallel to
SCSI adapters... I just saw one from Trantor for $149, would not be a bad
price to pay to get SCSI at all. Of course drivers are still needed.



June 6, 1992; Thad:

Over the years there were three SCSI projects for the 3B1 of which I'm aware.

One was from some outfit in NJ which apparently produced boards but were
unable (or unwilling?) to do the software.

Some "group" project was discussing their ideas in the unix-pc.* hierarchy
some two years ago; no news since then.

One member of our local Users' Group claims to have made some headway in
that he's able to operate ESDI drives (via an MC68HC11 daughterboard), and
that SCSI should be "Real Soon Now", time permitting.

The person in our user group is Eric Smith (er...@telebit.com).




Guess who posted this on June 8, 1992:

Howsoever may be this outcome, another thought arises:
can the sort of SCSI adapter folks like Trantor and others make,
that rides outboard on a parallel printer port, be put to use with the 3b1?
... and if so, how?
-- Fred



Nov. 23, 1993; Jeff Alsip:

No Frank, I kind of liked the humor....
and I was not the least bit confused!
I think you might actually stand a better chance of finding Bigfoot
than finding a SCSI card for the 3B1.
Good luck.


Jan 3, 1994:

Most likely, the biggest problem wouldn't be in replacing the
driver for the parallel port, but in hooking into the disk
driver routines so that file-system system calls like stat,
fstat, ustat, mknod, link, mount, sync, unlink, and umount
do the right things with any disk that might be connected to the
pseudo-SCSI port.

Frankly, I doubt that this will ever happen.

[Bill Gunshannon]

In article <5173685A...@thadlabs.com>,

OK, so what ever happened to this idea? I know I have at least one
(maybe more) of those parallel port SCSI thingies floating around.
Not to mention some parallel port to ethernet thingies as well.
Oh yeah, and I think I still have 3B1 OS source code floating around
somewhere, too (if the floppies are still readable after all these
years!)

Who would be the IP rights holder for the 3B1 OS code at this point?
Anyone interested in seeing if they would agree to release it under
something like the GPL or a BSD style license? Can't imagine it has
much, if any, commercial value left.