Sperry anyone?

From: Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk_at_yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Mon Nov 15 07:56:42 2004

On Mon, 2004-11-15 at 03:24 -0800, William Maddox wrote:
> The 5000/50 is apparently a 68020-based Unix box, formerly the NCR Tower
> series.

Actually I believe the Sperry ones are Unisys; Unisys made them under
licence from NCR though (I don't think they changed any of the hardware,
just the model numbers)

I've got a NCR Tower 700/32 - it was a pretty nice machine. It's been
dead in my garage for a few years now with a PSU fault though. The 700's
got a 68030 CPU for memory, 39MB ECC memory, and an absolutely monster
system board (about 1m x 0.5m).

Mine's got the DHPSIO dual serial board giving 16 terminal lines, dual
channel SCSI board, and Ethernet. For the age it positively flew - the
thing absolutely bristles with auxiliary processors and cache memory. It
just took about a week to start up and run all the diags :-) (I remember
it had more cache memory on the disk controller than I had main memory
in my PC at the time...)

The local console's via a 15 pin connector; if anyone buys these EBay
ones then shout and I'll dig the pinouts out. They also support a remote
console via a modem on a seperate port.

I *think* I've still got an ST506 mass storage controller and 8-channel
serial board that'd probably work with these EBay ones if needed.

The Ethernet boards for them are like gold dust btw - not many systems
shipped with them.

What I don't have for mine is docs or install media, just a few
photocopied pages of dip switch settings (I was lucky enough to borrow
the doc set from someone years ago). So someone please save these
machines if they come with docs or media :)

cheers,

Jules
Received on Mon Nov 15 2004 - 07:56:42 GMT