Speaking of PS/2s...

From: Tothwolf <tothwolf_at_concentric.net>
Date: Wed Dec 19 00:08:21 2001

On Tue, 18 Dec 2001, Doc Shipley wrote:

> I have a 5870-121 that I snarked recently, with 4 megs of RAM and a
> 120M ESDI drive. I'm wondering what I want to put on it as OS. I have
> plenty of Linux/NetBSD critters. I was thinking OS/2, but I threw v3.0
> Warp on Saturday night, but it's slow as dirt with 4 megs. Oh, yeah. It
> had the original reference disk in the floppy drive. I think that's
> really why I bought it.

Are you sure the drive is ESDI? I think the model 70 shipped with an IDE
drive.

> Main questions are, how uncommon are they (I know how cool they are),
> is either one worth anything, and is there a contemporary Unix that'll
> run on the model 70? Um, that's actually available I mean. All I need is
> another Ultrix quest.

I have no idea about worth, I guess they are only worth what we PS/2 fans
are willing to pay for them. Personally I probably wouldn't pay more than
maybe $25-30 or so for one, with or without a monitor.

As far as an operating system goes, I know Linux supports the MCA arch,
but most Linux distributions do not ship a boot kernel with MCA support
compiled in. Since you have a small drive, you'd also want a distribution
with a small footprint. Anyone have any recommendations on a particular
distribution?

> Corollary questions: I mentioned earlier that I've found PS/2 adapters
> in 7012 series RS/6ks. I still have 'em. The 8514/A with the 512k
> daughterboard is recognized in the model 70 by the reference utility,
> but Warp pukes on it, and insists on 640x480x16 VGA settings. Did I miss
> something? Do I need to "copy the options disk" even though Setup
> already sees it?

If I remember correctly, the 8514/A adapter needed an 8514 monitor to do
anything more than 640x480x16 since it used odd frequencies. Maybe a
multisync will work if the sense pins are jumpered correctly on the DB-15?

-Toth
Received on Wed Dec 19 2001 - 00:08:21 GMT