ables@lot.ACA.MCC.COM (King Ables) (03/06/91)
A friend of a friend has approached me with a problem that I think will only be solved if someone else happens to have what he needs. He has an old, old, old (did I mention it was old?) Unix system, a Callan Data Unistar 100 (multibus architecture), running v7. He dug it out of a closet in his company and has been playing around with it. For a while it was working but now has a corrupted boot block and won't boot. He couldn't find a boot floppy in any of the boxes. He tried to contact Callan Data but they are apparently out of business. He tried to contact UniSoft (who did the port) but they were not only unhelpful but rude (his words... I would have expected them to be little help with such an old port, and I've never known them to go out of their way to even be nice, either, so I'm not surprised). He knows he could go out and buy a new machine and that this one is a museum piece, but he'd like to make sure he's exhausted all his options before giving up... so I put the following questions: a) does someone have an old boot floppy from this thing they'd be willing to copy for him or give him or otherwise provide to him so that he can reboot and reinstall his system? b) does anybody have any suggestions about alternative ways of getting a version of Unix on this thing (surely nobody ELSE ported a version to it, but I figured it was worth asking)? c) does anybody know anybody else not on the net who might be able to help out (and of course, who would be willing to)? I will be glad to collect responses and talk to him if you simply want to pass information or ideas to him... in that case just send mail to me. If you wish to ask questions of the guy to find out more or arrange a disk swap or anything, I would prefer that you talk to him directly. His name is Duhan and he can be reached by phone at +1 512 258 3819. I will pass messages along to him if you want him to call you. Thanks for any leads. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- King Ables Micro Electronics and Computer Technology Corp. ables@mcc.com 3500 W. Balcones Center Drive +1 512 338 3749 Austin, TX 78759 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
dastrout@miavx1.acs.muohio.edu (root@next1) (03/09/91)
Please Help!!!. I have the exact same thing! I have a mess of floppys, but I Can't figure out how to make the system boot from a floppy instead of the HD. I would dearly love to make this system go, but am out of ideas. Anyone w/ one of these please contact me. I will post a summary. Thanx, Dave Strout -- dastrout@miavx1.acs.muohio.edu dastrout%miavx1.bitnet@pucc.princeton.edu root@next1.acs.muohio.edu 513-523-8245
botton@i88.isc.com (Brian D. Botton) (03/13/91)
In article <4177.27d824b1@miavx1.acs.muohio.edu> dastrout@miavx1.acs.muohio.edu (root@next1) writes: >Please Help!!!. I have the exact same thing! I have a mess of floppys, but I >Can't figure out how to make the system boot from a floppy instead of the HD. >I would dearly love to make this system go, but am out of ideas. Anyone w/ >one of these please contact me. I will post a summary. > I had a Callan Unistar until I bought a 3B1. The 3B1 was about 10 times faster and I just couldn't live with the slow Callan anymore. I gave it away about 2 years ago, but the guy I gave it to was my best man at my wedding last September. I'll give him a call and see if he still has it. Don't hold your breath though, he lives 4 hours away and I don't get back home too often. If you guys are still interested, send me e-mail. To make a boot floppy for the Callan, you have to go to the kernel object and run the makefile there. It builds a floppy unix with root and pipe on the floppy and swap on the HD. You format and mkfs on a floppy and move over the files you need, along with the floppy unix. BTW, I got my machine because the college I went to was going to throw them away. So I digged one complete and one partial machine out of the trash. Both machines had had monitor failures that fed high voltage back into the video controllers, burning them out. Fortunately, the video controller was just a VT100 emulator, or perhaps it was a real VT100 controller board. Anyway, I bought a used VT100 and then could boot and shutdown the machine properly. Its too bad it was so slow. I liked its lean, mean V7 operating system. If it had been demand paging I might have been tempted to keep it. -- ... ___ *** _][_n_n___i_i ________ ******* Brian D. Botton (____________I_I______I_I_______I laidbak!botton or /ooOOOO OOOOoo oo oooo oo oo laidbak!bilbo!brian
carter@cat2.cs.wisc.edu (Gregory Carter) (03/18/91)
any of you 68K guru's out there own a 68K machine with a VME backplane? And if you do, could you tell me what I can expect as far as cards for my newly acquired Atari MEGA STE with VME slot? I would like to here some opinions as far as working with this backplane? --Gregory