One from the 'believe it or not' file...

From: James Willing <jimw_at_agora.rdrop.com>
Date: Sun Nov 16 17:10:49 1997

At 02:18 PM 11/16/97 -0500, Ward Donald Griffiths III wrote:
>
>The marching blocks is almost always a sign of a serious motherboard
>problem. One of my three suffers from it, so it's set aside for parts.
>Unless that machine was shipped without an OS preinstall, which would
>make it unique in my experience.

Actually, (if memory serves) from the time when the computer store I was in
was a dealer for them, they did *not* come with the OS preinstalled. There
were rather lenghty debates at the time over if we would charge for loading
it up before delivery.

>It's well worth spending time with. A fairly unique user interface over
>Unix, a fine 68010 CPU. The case design I still consider one of the
>sexiest _ever_ put on the market. Admittedly, the built-in 1200 baud
>modem is pretty well a lost cause.

True on all count... Altho I think one of the things that really killed it
was the bit-mapped video sub-system that required the CPU to do all the
screen work.

>If the OS level isn't at least 3.0, the disks are fairly useless, though
>some of the documentation may still be usable. There were some missteps
>in integrating the Convergent Technologies kernel with the AT&T stuff.

The disks are labeled as v3.5

>If you do get it to boot, there is a nice little Easter Egg invoked by
>the command ".!." from a shell prompt. That's dot-bang-dot. It'll give
>a list of the folks at AT&T, Convergent and Alloy who were involved in
>the project. Some of whom I worked with or otherwise met in the early
>90's at Unisys at the old Convergent campus in San Jose, though most had
>gone on to other companies.

I like it...

>And if you're interested, I may be able to supply a DOS-73 card -- I've
>got a couple I'm not using much -- not much runs these days on an 8086
>with 512K and Hercules graphics.

That might make for some interesting tinkering...

>If you don't get it to boot and you have the later keyboard (with slots
>to take function key labels) I'd be interested in the keyboard at least,
>as those are not as common as the older keyboards I have -- the change
>was made not long before AT&T bailed out of the project.

Boot or not (and I suspect it will) it will have a home in the collection.

-jim
---
jimw_at_agora.rdrop.com
The Computer Garage - http://www.rdrop.com/~jimw
Computer Garage Fax - (503) 646-0174
Received on Sun Nov 16 1997 - 17:10:49 GMT

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