Apple II : lying in the trash

Sometimes strange things happens , Yesterday I was in the terrace of a Bar drinking a beer with some friends, when a bum started to dig in the trash of a container near our table, he found some computer element and started to try to break a solid square box to remove some cables, after some attempts he leave the container.

After a few minutes I went to the container and what was lying there ? .... a very old Apple II Europlus system, with two 5 1/4 floppy drive !!!

Below is the photograph of the machine after arriving home and cleaning some of the dust

It seems that some keys are missing but my first impression is that the motherboard and floppy controler would work, I will loook for some TV cables to connect the system to the TV and see if nice machine still works.

Unfortunately the floppy cables has been removed, so I will try to build a new ones for the floppies.

About the apple II , this was the second machine build by apple, this machine have a 8 bit processor , and apple start to sell this model several years before the first Mac.

DEC 3000/400

This old 64 bit system (according to Wikipedia , this models were build from 1992 to 1995), has been donated by a Spanish University.

This machines were the FIRST with a 64 bit processor (Alpha), from DIGITAL, later buy by compaq , now part of HP, nice world, Digital is one of the historic companies. and Unix was first develoved in a "PDP" series machine.



the system is currenly runninng an old operating system named OSF/1:,

# uname -a
OSF1 theory.cie.uma.es V4.0 878 alpha

but in the ALPHA chip, you could also run OpenVMS (from Digital), most of the free Unix (*BSD, Linux) and also Windows NT for Alpha !!!

This machine has the following hardware configuration:

DEC 3000 - M400
Digital Equipment Corporation
System conducting power up tests
------------------------------------------------------------

Devnam Devstat
-------- -------
CPU OK KN15-BA -V7.0-S887-I21F-sV1.0-DECchip 21064 P3.0
OSC 133 MHz
ASIC OK
MEM OK 64MB
NVR OK
SCC ?? 004 0060 ptr(0) = Not Present keybd(2) = Not Present
NI OK Ethernet Address: 08-00-2B-3F-8F-1A , TENBT
SCSI OK
ISDN OK
TC0 TC0 OK - PMAGB-BA
------------------------------------------------------------

Interesting is that the machine can be opened very quickly: here is an image of the interior , see the FAN row , they don't produce any noise when running.


unscrewing two screws, the rest of the hardware is opened:



showing the memory banks and CPU and the three fan in a row.



As usual with the Digital system, the console uses a "non standard" connector, named "MMJ", and need also a "MMJ to RJ45" cable named BN24J-07 , with and aditional adaptor from RJ45 to DB9 to be used for console, here you can see the rear part of the machine, with the ethernet connector (RJ45 and AUI), the ISDN and RJ11 (modem) connector and then the MMJ , Serial , Parallel and SCSI connector.



To be able to change the root password the system must boot on single user mode, remount the root partition with read write permissions and then change the /etc/password file , deleting the root password "root::0:1:root users:/:/bin/sh:

• from the boot prompt boot: >>> boot -fl s
• from the # console mount with rw persmissions: mount -u /
• Set the console to VT102 : TERM=vt102
• export TERM
• launch vi : vi /etc/passwd
• Contiene with the booting: exit

This is a new addition to the Museum.

Sun Ultra1

This computer was adquired about 1995 , and ceased to work about 2004 , it was one of the first machines with a 64 bit sparc CPU . The machine have only 64Mb of RAM , not so much now but enought for a small server (HTTP, SMPT/pop3, FTP) that can also used as personal workstation.

The machine has two internal hard disks and a cdrom , and was updated with an external/low cost SCSI disk to accomodate the "/home" of the users.

The mouse was an optical one, typical of Sun, but not usual for normal Pc users, and the mouse pad was required in order to work with it.

The operating system was solaris 7, unfortunately the system disk is broken so we are waiting for some folk to provide us with a new one .

HP9000 model 850

This is a old machine (it's still running a old HP-UX 6.X operating system) that was used for a long time as laboraty system for C programming and also as central mail server for the computer department.

The machine was shutdown in 1999, after detecting that the operating system was not Y2K compatible, and there were no patch for it ;-), the operating system was from 1988, so it was a long time running.

The operating system lacks of all the Gnu commodities and modern system commodities (no bash, no color ls , user password in the /etc/password file, etc), etc and obsviusly few "normal" init daemons, and was configured to use TCP/IP and X.25 network.

The system is still capable of running (it's currenlty shutdown due to the energy problems in the room ;-), and after changing the password (nice password recovery help in google) I was able to setup a network and connect using telnet to the system.

The first module in the top is the tape unit (sorry , We don't have any tape to test) , the second is the CPU itself and the last one is the Hard disk unit, a lot of noise but they still boot, also we have the monocrome orange terminal that was used for connection to the system.

We are looking for a "modern" HP-UX (at least Y2K compatible) that could be installed in the system, and if possible a spare hard disk to not delete the original HP-UX 6.X operating system (it's a relic by itself ;-).