Hardware free to a good home

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, I have got some hardware I have to get rid of by the end of February, and it's free to any of you guys if you are willing to come and pick it up in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. Last November I received a load of equipment from one company here in Cleveland. It was a complicated network of CPUs and peripherals of all makes and models put together by Xerox and intended to be used as a dedicated document processing system. The CPUs included one VAX, three unidentifiable towers, and a bunch of PCs. I'm using the VAX and all disk and tape drives myself for my own purposes, and I'm selling the PCs, but still I've got those three unidentifiable towers and three very funky monitors that were attached to them. There is also a very funky laser printer attached to one of them. Given that the VAX and all disk and tape drives have been taken out of the equation, it's unlikely that the rest of the stuff can still be used for that dedicated document processing whatever thing, but the towers have some apparently generic controller boards in them (VME or something like that) and other parts that can be raided for. Who knows, maybe even the CPUs are standard (probably some 68K), in which case someone who knows more about this than I do (NULL) may be able to actually use these machines for something. The only identification on this equipment are the Xerox model numbers. One of the towers was called NS8090 File Server. It had an external SCSI hard disk and an Exabyte tape drive, but I've reused these for my own purposes. The other two towers were called 6085 workstations, and they were diskless from the beginning (as far as I can tell they don't have any mass storage controllers). All three have monitors with very funny connectors. Aside from the Xerox model numbers which tell me absolutely nothing, there are no hints whatsoever as to what the CPU architecture is and all that. All towers have AUI Ethernet ports. The laser printer is called NS8000 Laser CP, and it was attached to the tower that was called the NS8090 File Server. The connectors are 25-pin like the serial and parallel ones, but they have slide locks like on AUI. These slide locks and the fact that the printer was apparently never intended to be connected to anything except an "NS8090 File Server" suggest that the printer's interface is not parallel or serial, but something very funny. It has been suggested to me that I take the boxes apart, ID as many boards as possible, and try to sell/donate them to whoever finds them useful (and the cabinets and such would probably have to be scrapped). However, the thing is, I don't really have time for all this, and it's naive to think that any of this stuff has any significant cash value. Right now I'm in the process of moving to another (cheaper) apartment in another part of Cleveland, and really don't feel like hauling that junk around with me. I have got these three CPU towers, three monitors, and one laser printer, all absolutely unidentifiable, that I have to get rid of. Given what a great job I've done at identifying and describing this stuff, it would be naive for me to expect to sell it. Therefore, I'm giving it away for free to anyone who is willing to come and pick it up. I have to vacate this apartment by the end of February, and if no one picks this stuff up, I will have no choice but to throw it in the big dumpster, which would be a great pity if this stuff is actually useful for something. Once again, I'm in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. Michael Sokolov TUHS 4BSD Coordinator 4.3BSD-* Maintainer Quasijarus Project Principal Architect & Developer Phone: 440-449-0299 or 216-217-2579 ARPA Internet SMTP mail: mxs46(a)k2.scl.cwru.edu TUHS WWW page: http://minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au/TUHS/ Quasijarus WWW page: http://minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au/Quasijarus/ Received: (from major@localhost) by minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au (8.9.1/8.9.1) id BAA03045 for pups-liszt; Wed, 3 Feb 1999 01:53:24 +1100 (EST) Received: from math.uwaterloo.ca (kcwellsc(a)math.uwaterloo.ca [129.97.140.144]) by minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id BAA03037 for <pups(a)minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au>au>; Wed, 3 Feb 1999 01:53:12 +1100 (EST) Received: (from kcwellsc@localhost) by math.uwaterloo.ca (8.8.8/8.8.8) id JAA29320; Tue, 2 Feb 1999 09:52:36 -0500 (EST) From: Ken Wellsch <kcwellsc(a)math.uwaterloo.ca> Message-Id: <199902021452.JAA29320(a)math.uwaterloo.ca> Subject: Re: Old UNIX file system formats To: erin(a)coffee.corliss.net (Erin W. Corliss) Date: Tue, 2 Feb 1999 09:52:35 -0500 (EST) Cc: norman(a)nose.cita.utoronto.ca, pups(a)minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.3.96.990201095832.20104A-100000(a)coffee.corliss.net> from "Erin W. Corliss" at Feb 1, 99 10:01:14 am Organization: University of Waterloo, Math Faculty Computing Facility (Alumni) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-pups(a)minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au Precedence: bulk I shouldn't have posted without doing the proper research. I took a gander at PUPS/Tools/Filesys/traverse.c.gz which I'm quite sure is one of the tools I wrote when I was finally able to figure out the contents of that V6 tape I had (also with no docs - it was such irony to look at the setup document on the tape *after* figuring the format out that clearly describes the block layout 8-). I notice traverse.c.gz does indeed use the LARG flag, not HUGE. Since few care, I'll not bother extracting enough of Venix 1.x to see whether that is where I met the HUGE flag or it is just my faulty memory... -- Ken | From owner-pups(a)minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au Mon Feb 1 13:06:04 1999 | | Hmm... I wrote a disk image editor in Visual Basic without knowing the | specs for the filesystem -- I set it up so that if the 9th pointer is zero | and the filesize is greater than one block, then it assumed the block | pointed to by the 8th pointer was a list of blocks in the file.