Busy week! (Sun 386i, NeXT)

From: Rich Lafferty <rich_at_alcor.concordia.ca>
Date: Mon Apr 17 21:37:45 2000

[For those that don't read acquisition reports, there's a parts search
request at the bottom!]

Whee, what a pleasant week or so it's been. :-) Found a local guy
selling a mono NeXT slab about a week ago -- I've been meaning to pick
up one of these for *years* but never really got around to it. So I
pick it up, and it's got an N4000A monitor. Now, for those that don't
know NeXT, the phosphor in the 4000s and 4000As is relatively
low-life. Like any Unix machine, NeXTs tended to be left turned on,
and there was no way to turn the display off when the machine was on
(power being supplied through the monitor cable). So, the displays by
now tend to be quite dim. So, the seller pulls it out of the closet
and it's under about half an inch of dust. He apologizes for the
condition, and explains that a local university bought it but only
used it three months before putting it in storage, and he bought it
from the university for a ridiculously low price but never used it
himself. So, with the dust out of the way, I find myself with what is
basically a brand-new NeXTstation! Were that not enough, it was a
*steal*, and then as I was leaving, the seller goes "Oh, I should give
you the documentation" and comes out with a NEXTSTEP Academic Bundle
(with Developer and Mathematica) and a documentation library.

So then today, a week later, I stop by my old faculty to pick up a Sun
386i that they were about to throw out ("Hey, better I decide to get
rid of it than you", I say). I'm carting the machine out the door
(alas, stripped of disks) and one of the technicians goes "You know, I
think we have some documentation for that". There was too much for me
to take; by the time we finished going through the storage room I'd
found the original 19" mono display, a full documentation set, the
system's purchase orders and maintenance history ($3500 for a 300mb
disk, anyone?), an expansion cabinet, and two boxes of looseleaf Sun
documentation about a foot square each, labeled "Owner's Supplement"
(but containing all sorts of hardware docs for sun-3, -4, and 386i)
and "Toolkit Documentation Set" (which appeared to be the equivalent
for software and drivers) and two bags of disks and tapes. All free!

So I still need to pick up a keyboard, which should be easy; but I'm
having a hard time tracking down the Y-cable for the 386i that goes
between the framebuffer card and the monitor and keyboard. It's a
501-1244 mono hi-res framebuffer and a 540-1062 monitor; anyone know
of a source for these cables?

  -Rich

-- 
------------------------------ Rich Lafferty ---------------------------
 Sysadmin/Programmer, Instructional and Information Technology Services
   Concordia University, Montreal, QC                 (514) 848-7625
------------------------- rich_at_alcor.concordia.ca ----------------------
Received on Mon Apr 17 2000 - 21:37:45 BST

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