Acquired some Nat Semi ICM-3216 systems

From: Steve Jones <classiccmp_at_crash.com>
Date: Tue Nov 19 01:25:00 2002

As mentioned, I just picked up some new machines in Canada...

A gent had saved some National Semiconductor ICM-3216's from a university
lab and was glad to find a new home for them. These are fairly full-
featured little systems designed to showcase NS's 32000 family, with on-
board serial and parallel ports, a SCSI controller with it's own Z80 to
mind the bus transactions, a modest expansion bus, etc. Since these were
board-level products, everything else like cases and drives had to be
built or found elsewhere.

Two of the hosts I received were timesharing systems and are housed in
nicely designed cases custom built from sheet steel. A third timesharing
host has gone elsewhere, and a fourth ICM was later built in a PC/AT clone
case where students could try coding on the bare metal by booting from a
SCSI floppy drive.

One of the timesharing systems powered up and ran just fine before
loading for the trip South.

The icing on the cake was an unexpected trove of manuals that originally
came with all this stuff, including full schematics for the boards, and
two (binary) versions of SysV Unix on QIC tape. I'm still sorting through
all this stuff, which includes a folder full of notes, letters, and some
brochures for different components like disk drives and terminals, mostly
from 1986.

Eventually I expect to get some pictures up, and depending on where VCF
East is I think I'd bring one along.

--Steve.
Received on Tue Nov 19 2002 - 01:25:00 GMT