Is anyone still monitoring this group?
MotoFox
PAX
--
MotoFox
Former superstar of the Muzak Forums, 2003-2009
Do not staple, fold, spindle or mutilate; keep away from sources of magnetism.
If ingested, do not induce vomiting.
Andy Botterill
> Mentor2K rules. There's a really great piece of classic iron.
>
> PAX
>
long time. My interests are verilog design and ATPG tools. Andy
MotoFox
Last summer I acquired a Mentor 2000 from a local hamfest, along with a
SYSGEN/Pick tape. I also acquired a souped-up Packard Bell Force 54CD a week ago
(see discussion on alt.sys.pc-clone.packard-bell) that I intend to use as a
terminal for the M2K when/if I finally get the M2K going.
The 30-MB main (and only) hard drive in the machine appears to be shot and I
probably need to replace it, but I haven't really delved into the machine's
inner workings yet. When I try to do the startup sequence and the machine goes
into self-test mode, the hard drive spins up and stalls repeatedly, making a
sound reminiscent of the "clicks of death" exhibited by Zip drives. The machine
then ceases to advance ay further past that point. And that's about as far as I
have gotten with the M2K overall.
I know the hard drives are located in a cage below the tape drives. Now, does a
M2K use an IDE hard drive (like in a PC) or some non-standard thing? In fact,
I've a nice little 128MB Compact Flash cartridge and a CF-to-IDE adapter that's
looking for a machine to call its home.
Is there much at all in a M2K that can be replaced with regular off-the-shelf
hardware that's available today, or should I try my luck at installing and
running Pick off a tape and ditch the hard drives altogether?
For the record, mine is of the later NCR type, with the two serial ports located
near the fans. Its chassis is also quite beaten up, and there's a big Fox
Racing-logo decal above the "M2000" on the lower right side. At some point in
time, somebody spray-painted the side panels with various shades of olive drab,
gray and brown, apparently to simulate Army camouflage. The guy who gave it to
me really didn't know that much about it, only that he set up the Pick tape on
it and mostly used it to process his shortwave call logbooks and prepare them
for bragging rights amongst the ARRL crowd.
Andy Botterill
> Well, let's get some going, then.
>
> Last summer I acquired a Mentor 2000 from a local hamfest, along with a
> SYSGEN/Pick tape. I also acquired a souped-up Packard Bell Force 54CD a
> week ago (see discussion on alt.sys.pc-clone.packard-bell) that I intend
> to use as a terminal for the M2K when/if I finally get the M2K going.
http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/other/index.htm
Sorry I only have modern PC+laptop running linux.
The above webpage above has a link to an installation guide which may be
useful to you.
night night andy
Bob Campbell
MotoFox <us...@example.com> wrote:
> Mentor2K rules. There's a really great piece of classic iron.
>
> PAX
The last Mentor I saw and used was a couple of ADDS Mentors. One was
512K RAM and a 40 meg (I think) 14" hard drive, reel tape drive (used
for software updates) and 16 serial ports. The other was a 256K RAM
and 20 meg (I think) hard drive, reel tape drive and 8 serial ports.
Both were the size of a washing machine, with S-100 bus card cage and
cards containing the CPU (Z800 I think), RAM boards and several serial
port boards. This was around 1990. The 256K machine was a backup.
The 512K machine was used 24/7, running about 8 terminals and 3
printers. It was running custom order entry/billing software in Pick
BASIC (of course). This was in a commercial print shop that ran 24/7.
It was astonishing how well this system ran, supporting 8 simultaneous
users, printing out various reports and invoices. All in 512K RAM.
I would love to have one of these machines today.
<sigh>
MotoFox
self-contained cabinet, about 5 1/2' tall * 2' wide, about the size of a
medium-sized refrigerator. Off the top of my head, they came with 128KB of RAM
installed (mine was upgraded at some point to 640KB), a QIC drive (you'd run
SYSGEN off it, to install the operating system) and a 30MB 5" hard drive. I
think you could install a floppy drive in an M2K somehow, but I haven't figured
out how to do that yet.
The public school district I live in had a Mentor 4000 installed at the
district's central office, and all the schools called into it every day to
submit attendance counts and inventory orders until 2005. It was scrapped that
summer in favour of a PC running the SIMH VAX emulator with Net-BSD (sad but
true.) Those fancier Mentors, like you described, could run laps around a
2000-class machine any day! ;o)
Bob Campbell
MotoFox <us...@example.com> wrote:
> Sounds almost like a 4000 or 5000 series machine.
Yeah, the 4000 number seems to ring a bell. It was a big brown box on
wheels. I remember the whole thing would start vibrating pretty good
when being heavily used, as the big hard drive was seeking back and
forth. Sometimes it would actually move a few inches across the floor
on the wheels. Every few days you had to push it back into the corner.
The reel to reel tape drive was mounted horizontally, and was self
threading. You just inserted the tape and closed the door. It would
thread the tape and mount it automatically.
The spare machine was kept in my office. I spent many hours playing
with it, and also keeping it up to date by backing up the main machine
and restoring that tape onto the spare machine.
Ah, good times.
MotoFox
classic "washing machine" form factor with the removable disk packs.) That
drive, too, would sometimes decide to go for a stroll around the computer centre
when things really got busy.
I've heard tales of 2000's going for walks when they really get going as well.
<i>"The reel to reel tape drive was mounted horizontally, and was self
threading. You just inserted the tape and closed the door. It would
thread the tape and mount it automatically."</i>
Did it use the great big 12" reels (like the IBMs of earlier eras) or smaller
reels, lile the earlier DEC tapes?
Bob Campbell
MotoFox <us...@example.com> wrote:
> Did it use the great big 12" reels (like the IBMs of earlier eras) or smaller
> reels, lile the earlier DEC tapes?
Yes, full size mainframe type reels. 9 track, 1600 BPI. Big hole in
the center, removable plastic ring around the backside of the hole for
write protect, etc.
MotoFox
for the big weekly backup runs if I remember correctly) and a smaller unit that
used the little DEC-style reels. They used that for their daily doings.
But it wasn't specifically a DEC machine and I don't remember what brand it was.
It was a boxy little unit about the size of a higher-rez CRT monitor, and they
had it set on a table. It had capacity for two seprate tapes like the DECtape
units and it could (and they did) use DEC reels. Did NCR or ADDS made a
Mentor-specific drive like that? I almost want to say it was a third-party unit.
MotoFox
The SD's machine used the same type of physical 3/4" tape and reels (like the
one shown in this photograph
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8f/DECtape.jpg/220px-DECtape.jpg)
but the recordings were incompatible. A reel recorded on a Mentor unit would be
unreadable on a DEC unit and vice versa. The DEC implementation could only hold
a couple hundred kilobytes whereas the Mentor implementation could store at
least a megabyte.