AT&T PC7300 3b1...Best Offer Accepted

[R G Crook]

AT&T PC7300 3b1 for sale
All orig. sys. s/w ; utilities s/w ; AT&T manuals ; + additional s/w.
Purchaser must pickup the PC in Guelph, ON., Canada
Cash or Certified Cheque only.

Additional info.: Please send e-mail to mailto:rcr...@sympatico.ca

[DoN. Nichols]

In article <39DBA80D...@sympatico.ca>,

R G Crook <rcr...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
>AT&T PC7300 3b1 for sale
>All orig. sys. s/w ; utilities s/w ; AT&T manuals ; + additional s/w.
>Purchaser must pickup the PC in Guelph, ON., Canada
>Cash or Certified Cheque only.

I don't need any more of them, but is it a 7300, or a 3b1? The
7300 has room for a half-height hard drive, and comes with a 20MB drive.
The 3b1 comes with room for the full height drives, and with either a
40MB or a 67MB drive. Whoever you find will probably want to know this.

Also -- "cash or certified cheque" when you're willing to accept
"best offer" -- are you simply trying to avoid the currency conversion
fees, since you are in Canada?

Good Luck
DoN.

--
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My Concertina web page: | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
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[R G Crook]

A: I do not accept cheques from any unknown person as I have received too many
which end up being " NSF "
B: Canadian funds only ! I am not going to bother with pesos, US $ or exchange
rates...
C: I have a 40MB HDD installed
.../RGCrook, CNA

[DoN. Nichols]

In article <39DBF608...@sympatico.ca>,

R G Crook <rcr...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
>A: I do not accept cheques from any unknown person as I have received too many
>which end up being " NSF "
>B: Canadian funds only ! I am not going to bother with pesos, US $ or exchange
>rates...
>C: I have a 40MB HDD installed
>.../RGCrook, CNA

Good luck finding a buyer, then. There is so little demand for
these today that people have been reduced to throwing them away, because
nobody is interested enough. And here you reduce the list of possible
buyers to those who either live in Canada, or who are willing to jump
through hoops to buy a machine which is of marginal interest at best.

As stated before, *I* am not interested in the machine, just
trying to show you what you are doing to your chances with your
restrictions.

Good Luck,

[cobracho...@gmail.com]

Agreed, you'd be lucky enough to find anyone who would take this machine for free, and hopefully a collector of obsolete equipment at that, as its pretty much obsolete by a long stretch. 68010 @ 10mghz, with 2400 baud modem and tiny loud HD measured in MB. Do the machine right and give it to a collector of obsolete junk. Preferably local, because it'd cost $30 US just to ship this anywhere.

I have a pile of vintage era equipment, but I know its all pretty much worthless. I keep it simply as an elephant graveyard, a place for these old machines to die, because otherwise they'd have been in a dumpster a long time ago. I don't even touch or look at them any more, because even though I like old equipment, they are pretty much totally useless for anything anymore. They don't even much hold my curiousity.

The 3B1 probably was a great wordprocessor, but I couldn't see it being used for anything else. I mean, how do you even get the data you make on it... off of it? You'd have to connect via 2400 baud modem and upload it somewhere. It doesn't even have 10baseT ethernet, having the old Starlan wretched stuff which you can't find anywhere at all anymore.

This machine was ahead of its time in its day, well, sort of... not really, when you consider its contemporaries were Mac Pluses... with a GUI interface.

[Thad Floryan]

On 4/3/2013 6:09 AM, cobracho...@gmail.com wrote:

To what or whom are you replying? You clipped-away
any/all attributions which is very poor form for
Usenet.

> [...]

> The 3B1 probably was a great wordprocessor, but I couldn't
> see it being used for anything else. I mean, how do you even
> get the data you make on it... off of it? You'd have to
> connect via 2400 baud modem and upload it somewhere. It
> doesn't even have 10baseT ethernet, having the old Starlan
> wretched stuff which you can't find anywhere at all anymore.

So, apparently you have never used a 3B1 else you wouldn't be
putting your foot in mouth with the above paragraph.

All of my 3B1s have both Ethernet and StarLAN and, due to the
poor driver from WillGoWrong. er. Wollongong the, StarLAN was
actually faster than Ethernet. The 3B1 Ethernet used standard
coax (as for 10BASE2) and StarLAN pioneered twisted-pair
Ethernet over existing plant CAT3 telephony wiring for a huge
cost savings for networking. Both the Ethernet and StarLAN were
1Mbps.

Here's some info about StarLAN:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarLAN

With a StarLAN network connected to Telebit T2500 modems it
had, for that time, very fast connectivity. Here are some
of the StarLAN components I still have (and they still work):

http://thadlabs.com/PIX/StarLAN_NAU_front.jpg 67kB
http://thadlabs.com/PIX/StarLAN_NAU_rear.jpg 77kB
http://thadlabs.com/PIX/StarLAN_NEU_hub.jpg 105kB

I have five of those NAUs each having two fast RS-232 ports
and two StarLAN ports. I connected the NAUs to two Telebit
T2500 modems and several other computers and terminals for
data exchange, UUCP email, operating EPROM burners (which
had RS-232 ports), etc. You can see a portion of my StarLAN
configuration in the O'Reilly "Managing uucp and Usenet" book
on the 4 pages I scanned and are available here (165kB):

http://thadlabs.com/FILES/OR_Mng_uucp+Usenet.pdf

Note the "access0" node shown in the above PDF is one port of
a StarLAN NAU which connected to one of my Amiga A1000 systems
for high-speed data transfer RS-232 <==> StarlAN.

As for the 3B1 being "only" a wordprocessor per your words is
prima facie evidence you never used one. With the VoicePower
card(s) the 3B1 was used in 1000s of movie theaters for people
to call into and use a voice activated menu to get the showtimes
and titles of what was playing. Also with the VoicePower card
the 3B1 was ubiquitous in legal offices especially here in
Silicon Valley.

Every year I'd demonstrate one or two 3B1 systems in the AT&T
booth at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco CA. I
would be running gcc, Emacs and a shoot-em-up game simultaneously
when at that time PCs were only single-tasking. I developed a
lot of software on the 3B1 with the most popular being 'tprobe'
for ascertaining tape info and duplicating boot tapes and I often
receive email stating it is still being used today on Linux systems.
The tprobe comp.sources.unix shar archive is here (ASCII text and
readable in any browser):

http://ae-www.technion.ac.il/pkgs/g-k/in/tprobe/tprobe 47kB

Dr. Dobbs Journal reference here dated 1-APR-1993, 20 years ago:

http://www.drdobbs.com/on-the-networks/184402700?_requestid=139511

> This machine was ahead of its time in its day, well, sort of...
> not really, when you consider its contemporaries were Mac Pluses...
> with a GUI interface.

which is further evidence you never used a 3B1, so why are you
posting here? The 3B1 has a 3-button mouse for use with its GUI
versus the crippled Apple Mac system with only a one-button mouse.

Note this comment:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh
" [...]
" Macs did not natively support pointing devices that featured
" multiple buttons, even from third parties, until Mac OS X
" arrived in 2001.

so one could argue the Mac was a pathetic subset of the 3B1. :-)

Thad

[DoN. Nichols]

On 2013-04-03, cobracho...@gmail.com <cobracho...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Agreed, you'd be lucky enough to find anyone who would take this
> machine for free, and hopefully a collector of obsolete equipment at
> that, as its pretty much obsolete by a long stretch. 68010 @ 10mghz,
> with 2400 baud modem and tiny loud HD measured in MB. Do the machine
> right and give it to a collector of obsolete junk. Preferably local,
> because it'd cost $30 US just to ship this anywhere.

It is certainly a tool for learning -- especially if you get the
Technical Reference Manual for it.

> The 3B1 probably was a great wordprocessor,

While I have a copy of WordMark Composer for it, I actually feel
that it does better with the nroff/troff suite, and the various other
parts of the Documenter's Workbench which came with it -- and your
choice of plain text editor. (I usually used jove on it, and many other
machines through the years to this time even.) Nroff could drive a
phototypesetter, and there were programs to convert that to PostScript,
and hang a laser printer on it and you get very nice looking documents.

> but I couldn't see it
> being used for anything else.

I used one as a news server -- using uucp to collect and send
news. Even then, I restricted to a small subset of the whole usenet
feed.

I also did a lot of programming on it -- and used it for a while
to handle a rather complex membership database which I wrote in C, and
which, at its peak, handled about 2500 memberships -- with lots of
associated data.

> I mean, how do you even get the data you
> make on it... off of it? You'd have to connect via 2400 baud modem and
> upload it somewhere. It doesn't even have 10baseT ethernet, having the
> old Starlan wretched stuff which you can't find anywhere at all anymore.

There were full ethernet cards available for the machine, I had
several of them networked together with a Sun 2/120 and a Tektronix
6130. The software to drive it was rather flakey (Willagong software,
IIRC), and it could not run a ping program because of the lack of a
microtime call in the system. But it was still a useful and interesting
machine. One as the news and e-mail server, one as my workstation, and
one as my wife's workstation -- for e-mail an news as well.

> This machine was ahead of its time in its day, well, sort of... not
> really, when you consider its contemporaries were Mac Pluses... with a
> GUI interface.

There was an alternate GUI available for it. And you could make
modifications to it to run up to two 190 MB hard drives -- (actually 160
MB usable size once formattted.)

Still useful things to learn on, I believe.

Good Luck,
DoN.

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(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html

[Thad Floryan]

On 4/3/2013 9:15 PM, DoN. Nichols wrote:
> [...]

> While I have a copy of WordMark Composer for it, I actually feel
> that it does better with the nroff/troff suite, and the various other
> parts of the Documenter's Workbench which came with it -- and your
> choice of plain text editor. (I usually used jove on it, and many other
> machines through the years to this time even.) Nroff could drive a
> phototypesetter, and there were programs to convert that to PostScript,
> and hang a laser printer on it and you get very nice looking documents.

> [...]

IIRC, there was a Microsoft Word available for the system, too, and
I'm looking for the manual and floppies right now.

Looking at one shelf of slipcased manuals with floppies finds the
DOCUMENTER WORKBENCH, SMART {Database Manager, Spreadsheet, and
Word Processor}, Supercomp, UNIX PC Word Processor, Sound Presentations,
Business Graphics, and a lot more.

Flipping through just one case of floppies finds StarKeeper, dBASE-III,
ah, finally, Microsoft Word Version 1.10 (2 floppies), Microsoft
MultiPlan, Supercomp 204, Voice Power {Answering Machine, Diagnostics,
VDA, Development Set, etc.}, floppies for the DOS-on-a-card (e.g.,
single hardware card IBM-PC) and DOS-73 Diagnostics, Fortran, Pascal 2.0,
BASIC Compiler, Microsoft Basic 1.03, LPI Cobol version 1.1.0, GSS-CHART,
and lots more.

The big problem was adding enough disk space to load up all the
software that was available -- I split installs across several systems.

> [...]

> There were full ethernet cards available for the machine, I had
> several of them networked together with a Sun 2/120 and a Tektronix
> 6130. The software to drive it was rather flakey (Willagong software,
> IIRC), and it could not run a ping program because of the lack of a
> microtime call in the system. But it was still a useful and interesting
> machine. One as the news and e-mail server, one as my workstation, and
> one as my wife's workstation -- for e-mail an news as well.

My Sun systems interoperated nicely with the 3B1s of which I still
have 3 fully functional ones all with their own Expansion Chassis.

> [...]

> There was an alternate GUI available for it. And you could make
> modifications to it to run up to two 190 MB hard drives -- (actually 160
> MB usable size once formattted.)
>
> Still useful things to learn on, I believe.

The 3B1 was an incredibly featureful system during the 1980s and the early
1990s. Mine all still function fine though I don't use them all that
much nowadays due to the long bootup time and the power consumption.

Thad

[Thad Floryan]

On 4/3/2013 9:15 PM, DoN. Nichols wrote:
> [...]

> There were full ethernet cards available for the machine, I had
> several of them networked together with a Sun 2/120 and a Tektronix
> 6130. The software to drive it was rather flakey (Willagong software,
> IIRC), and it could not run a ping program because of the lack of a
> microtime call in the system.

> [...]

I meant to add the following item under "Subject: Trivia Time ..." but a
phone call distracted me. Here's something from the ping author that
qualifies as "trivia":

http://ftp.arl.army.mil/mike/ping.html

Thad

[Thad Floryan]

On 4/3/2013 11:06 AM, Thad Floryan wrote:
> [...]

> actually faster than Ethernet. The 3B1 Ethernet used standard
> coax (as for 10BASE2) and StarLAN pioneered twisted-pair

> [...]

I erred; the 3B1 Ethernet cards provided an AUI connector:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_Unit_Interface

to which one would connect an adapter to whatever cabling one
was using such as this AUI-to-ThinCoax adapter which I used:

http://www.decserver.com/xhxs/tupian/ant/MX10.jpg

Thad

[DoN. Nichols]

On 2013-04-04, Thad Floryan <th...@thadlabs.com> wrote:
> On 4/3/2013 9:15 PM, DoN. Nichols wrote:
>> [...]
>> While I have a copy of WordMark Composer for it, I actually feel
>> that it does better with the nroff/troff suite, and the various other
>> parts of the Documenter's Workbench which came with it -- and your
>> choice of plain text editor. (I usually used jove on it, and many other
>> machines through the years to this time even.) Nroff could drive a
>> phototypesetter, and there were programs to convert that to PostScript,
>> and hang a laser printer on it and you get very nice looking documents.
>> [...]
>
> IIRC, there was a Microsoft Word available for the system, too, and
> I'm looking for the manual and floppies right now.

> , floppies for the DOS-on-a-card (e.g.,
> single hardware card IBM-PC) and DOS-73 Diagnostics,

This reminds me of a project which could have (and should have)
been done. Since the DOS-73 card had a serial port (or two), it would
have been a natural for a smart serial port -- really high baud rates
and buffer data until a full line accumulates, so the unix doesn't have
the load of an interrupt and thus a context switch per character sent or
received. That load made running a TeleBit WorldBlazer (or others of
the family) at maximum speed (for uucp transfers) bring the system to a
tiny percentage of its capacity. Of course, once Uunet stopped using
Telebits, in favor of other modem protocols which while nominally faster
were in reality slower given the uucp spoofing that the TeleBit could
perform.

Anyway -- offloading the serial port to a smart card would have
made a lot of sense. I didn't know enough about programming Intel
processors to be able to do that.

>> Still useful things to learn on, I believe.
>
> The 3B1 was an incredibly featureful system during the 1980s and the early
> 1990s. Mine all still function fine though I don't use them all that
> much nowadays due to the long bootup time and the power consumption.

Indeed. Last time I had mine up was to help someone recover
data from two of the 190 MB drives (both of his were the Maxtors, IIRC.)

There were some stuptd things about it -- such as the backup
system refusing to back up any file older than the install date of the
OS, which meant that programs transferred from an older system via
floppy and tarfile would not get backed up. The one in particular which
I remember was the updated version of mkdir, adding the "-p" option to
make it create missing directories in the path being created. That one
had another problem too, since it was part of the original install, so
it was skipped on two counts. :-)

Enjoy,

[DoN. Nichols]

On 2013-04-04, Thad Floryan <th...@thadlabs.com> wrote:

> On 4/3/2013 11:06 AM, Thad Floryan wrote:
>> [...]
>> actually faster than Ethernet. The 3B1 Ethernet used standard
>> coax (as for 10BASE2) and StarLAN pioneered twisted-pair
>> [...]
>
> I erred; the 3B1 Ethernet cards provided an AUI connector:

Aha! I thought that was what I remembered. But everything is
currently in storage, so I could not check easily. I thought that it
might have both an AUI and a BNC as some things I have worked with were
equipped.

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_Unit_Interface
>
> to which one would connect an adapter to whatever cabling one
> was using such as this AUI-to-ThinCoax adapter which I used:
>
> http://www.decserver.com/xhxs/tupian/ant/MX10.jpg

And I was connecting to thicknet transceivers at first --
actually using RG-8 cable instead of the official triple-shielded
(braid, metal foil, and braid again) with the markings saying "bite
here" for the vampire taps. :-)

BTW I did not follow up to the one about ping, but reading it reminds
me that I actually met Mike when we (Night Vision Labs) were
adding to our network.

I did not know that he wrote ping at the time, however.

[tlvp]

On Wed, 03 Apr 2013 22:44:43 -0700, Thad Floryan wrote:

> ... Here's something from the ping author that

> qualifies as "trivia":
>
> http://ftp.arl.army.mil/mike/ping.html
>
> Thad

Thanks, Thad: the last sentence of the final review there very well
describe that page itself -- "Its clean, its fun, and its just great."

Cheers, -- tlvp
--
Avant de repondre, jeter la poubelle, SVP.