more interesting finds!

From: Innfogra_at_aol.com <(Innfogra_at_aol.com)>
Date: Thu Nov 26 03:26:05 1998

Joe,
I wish I were there.

You should hang the DG core plane on the wall. They are great art.
I think all core you get should be kept. Usually there is so much good (old)
gold in them they go to scrap first. While later core planes, including the
DG, didn't use much some of the early examples are spectacular. And, who
knows, someone might want to get an old Nova 800 running again.

The small pizza boxes are Sun compatible X-Window Terminals. Plug in a
multisync SVGA monitor (preferably one good to 1280X1024), PS/2 mouse and
keyboard and you should be able to get it to come up and run digs somewhere in
the windowing system. I say Sun compatible because of the keyboard port. It
would be interesting to know if Sun chips or the 68020/68881 chips were in it.
Usually generic X-Window terminals used Motorola chips. If it had Sun chips it
would be a Sparkstation of some kind. Probably not a Spark though, no SCSI
port.

 HDS (Human Designed Systems) made terminals to be hooked up to mainframes.
Almost all terminal makers brought out a X-Window terminals for Ethernet
networks. HDS was well respected, I'm not surprised that some of their
machines got out there. Most X-Window machines had this many ports, Sun
keyboard excluded. They were platform independent, relying on TCP/IP and X-
Windows which usually booted from ROM. This one looks like it would hook up to
any kind of Ethernet you had, keyboard, mouse, parallel printer, modem, serial
tablet, are there any leftover ports, oh yes the Sun Keyboard (or the PC
keyboard if you hooked up a Sun one). My guess is that this is a later
Motorola based X-Window terminal that is nearly plug and play on a Sun Solaris
Ethernet system.

NOTE: X-Window terminals were often crammed full of memory (2 to 16meg
generally), usually SIMS. This often gets stripped first, even before the
surplus shop gets it. Look for signs the case has been opened. If you can,
check the machine yourself. Spark clones have 32 to 64 Megs of Ram, have good
trading value.

the earliest of these are about 10 yrs old so they can be on topic. Let us
know what else you find!
Paxton

PS I see more current info out there after reading the mail. If it is an
intel/TI system those are fairly rare and, I think, worth collecting.
Received on Thu Nov 26 1998 - 03:26:05 GMT