Free NCR tower in Miami FL.

From: Julian Richardson <JRichardson_at_softwright.co.uk>
Date: Wed Dec 8 04:46:20 1999

>> available soon. He says one is a "NCR 400" and the other is a "NCR 450".
>> Both have non-functional tape drives (don't know the problem) and are
>> running SCO Unix.
>> Does anyone know anything about these machines?

Hmm, I don't think any of the Tower series are PC-based clones; they're
all fully-functional Unix boxes. I didn't know they'd run SCO though, my
Tower runs NCR's SVR3.

I scrapped what I seem to remember was a Tower 400 about 6 years ago; it
had a tape drive in it (custom controller I think), MFM disks (about
200MB worth), think it was a 68010 CPU.

I've got a Tower 700 which was a later model - 32MB main memory
(actually 39MB ECC), 68030, 8 serial lines, 780MB SCSI (2 disks), 10Mbps
ethernet, 150MB tape (also SCSI). There may have been a SCSI option for
the 400 series. I have a few docs somewhere which I might be able to
hunt down if you need more info.

Certainly the 700 I have is quite a nice machine - there's enough 68xxx
series processors in it for all the subsystems that it runs pretty
nicely. I was lucky enough to have X Windows installed too. I can't
speak for the 400 that I broke up as one of the disks in it was toasted
so I never saw it running.

I'd say they're worth having if you have space and can transport them
(pretty heavy beasts). You may be lucky enough to get an ethernet
controller or two as well - I gather that these aren't too common - then
they'll hook up to just about anything.

Oh, if you get a chance can you see if there's any OS tapes lying
around?? I haven't got installation media for my 700 so when one of the
disks goes I'm in trouble... I'm not sure how NCR shipped OS tapes and
whether one tape would cover a series of Tower systems or not...

cheers

Jules
>
Received on Wed Dec 08 1999 - 04:46:20 GMT