eichin@apollo.HP.COM (Mark Eichin) (01/19/91)
I was just given two NEC APC's (one color, one monochrome.) These beasts are 8086 machines, with two 8 inch drives (single or double density - the boards have both 1771 and 765 controllers on them...) The A drives on both machines are shot, but the B drives are fine (the machine comes with a "test82" diagnostics disk, which passes on the B drives but fails to write on the A drives, which wouldn't boot the disk directly anyway.) I've got the original MSDOS 2.11 floppies for these, which won't boot (they've been kept in the pockets of the manuals, but that shouldn't have harmed them... they are about 8 years old, though.) 1) Does anybody still use these? 1a) Can anybody out there make 8" boot disks for me? 1b) How about a disk that's got kermit on it? 2) Does NEC support these at all? The hardware design is really solid - latches on all of the ribbon cable connectors, levers to remove the boards, the drives are the only part that's bad (well, the Lithium batteries are dead too, but they're on a socketed cable, mounted to the side of the chassis.) 3) Does hooking up 3.5" drives in place of the dead 8" ones sound like it would present any problems? I'd appreciate any comments or hints; these machines will at least make excellent terminals, though doing development on them would be even better. _Mark_ <eichin@apollo.com> <eichin@athena.mit.edu> ps. If there's a better newsgroup for these questions, please point me at it, and I'll go quietly...