Azog-Thoth@cup.portal.com (William Thomas Daugustine) (05/08/90)
On April 21, 1990, I aquired a Plexus P/35 for $80. When I brought it, I asked if it was working. 'It was working four years ago, when it was removed from service' is the answer I got. This thing has been sitting in someones basement for four years! Theres minor disfigurment to the case and such, but I dont think anything major was damaged. Looks like water damage: theres some corrosion on the serial connectors, and the boards are quite dirty. I havent found anything yet to clean the boards, I tried FluxOff, but ran out of that fast! Anyways. The machine: 68000 12MHz CPU board, a RAM board banked with 156 64K DRAM chips (the closest I make it out is 1meg), a serial interface board (with room for about 16 ports), and a hard/tape drive controller. I -think- this is a Multibuss-II or VMEbuss, but dont hold me to it! It also has an 84meg 8" Fujistu SCSI drive, and a QIC-?? tape drive, standard size. When I first powered it on, I was getting errors on the RAM board. Ive talked with Motorola, who now support Plexus hardware, and was told how to bypass the selftest failure to get to boot. I got into the 'primary boot' prompt, but thats about it... Pressing '?' gives me a status listing of all the errors. Of course with no books or docs, I cant decipher this. Pressing return will attempt to boot the hard drive. After a few seconds, I get 'unable to wake disk controller' 'exit 10'. The tape drive seems to be working, but intermittanly. An 'ls' command returns with a 'bad tape read', of course since its a blank tape. Does anyone have the same machine? If so, could you possibly send me a bootable tape, and the file system so I can try to transfer it to the hard drive? Id gladly reimburse you for the tape. Right now the thing is a paper-weight, and Id really like to get it running, but am in need of a system tape. Many thanx for listening to my babbling! Billy D'Augustine Azog-Thoth@cup.portal.com (201)989-8161