Model 25, Space Saving Keyboard, and PS/2 mouse

After a long search, several months ago, I finally got my hands on this: an IBM 8525, the PS/2 Model 25. It is perhaps the “cutest” computer IBM ever made, if that is an acceptable adjective for a computer at all.

I got it for pocket change from the local e-recycling facility in dirty and (I was warned) heavily abused condition, including at least one potential  hard drop from being thrown. My interest was primarily in the chassis to gut it and build up a modern system inside…but to my surprise, aside from the Kyocera KC-20B hard drive and Alps 720K floppy drive, it was totally working. The CRT (this is the monochrome model) has pretty awful screenburn, though.

Because it’s in working conditon, I decided not to gut it (for now)…it just hangs around as yet another long-obsolete x86 computer, but has character the other systems might be lacking. The current configuration is as follows:

• 8086 CPU
• 512KB RAM
• VCF XT-IDE card with WD75AA hard drive
• Custom floppy drive cable with Sony 2.88M PS/2 floppy drive
• Integrated MCGA graphics with monochrome CRT
• WD8003/W Ethernet card with Centrecom 210TS 10baseT transceiver
• MS-DOS with MTCP – yup, I’ve had it online :)

The fate of this system isn’t really known, but I do know I’ll hang onto this one in one form or another for a good while.

More, including photos: click here.

Dolch PAC 65

My latest acquisition – which I paid an exorbitant amount to have shipped to me – is a fun one (but then, they all are): a Dolch PAC 65 network sniffer.

Now, ‘network sniffer’ isn’t really the best way to describe it (or the other Dolch products of the period): more accurately, it’s a “luggable” (aka “briefcase”) computer. For those unfamiliar, you might consider taking a peek at Compaq’s first product. Basically, it (the Dolch) is a desktop-like PC, monitor, keyboard and on some models pointing device all wrapped together into a case with a carrying handle for portability.

In the case of Dolch and their products, these machines were equipped with multiple network interfaces (often specialized hardware with additional processing power, not just typical cards you’d use to connect any computer to any network) and network monitoring software. You, as a network technician or analyst, would take the machine (the “lug” in luggable) to the worksite experiencing difficulties, plug it in, get it running and have it keep an eye on the traffic on the network for a set period of time. You would then review the findings on the same machine (hence why it needs a proper operator’s console built in) to help identify problems or form statistics.

That’s all fine and good of course…but certainly not what I’m going to use it for (well, I might equip it to be able to do such tasks, but they won’t be the primary focus). I plan to make some modifications/upgrades, swap in some other hardware and make somewhat of a more modern box (current plans are a mid to high end P3 with 512 or 768MB of RAM – a very competent platform, definitely capable of running Windows 7 but I would like to experiment with some sort of Linux instead). I haven’t entirely decided yet.

Anyway, on to tech specs…will start with the previous model in the series, the PAC 64. That is a Pentium MMX system with a standard baby AT form factor motherboard. The internal LCD connects with a ribbon to a special PCI VGA video card that has the LCD output (LVDS on later models) built in. The power supply, though a very unique form factor, is AT compatible meaning it can be used with a multitude of motherboards. This makes for a very mod-happy platform…it’s easy to swap the motherboard and reuse the video card, making upgrades easy.

Now, about this PAC 65…it’s a Pentium II 350 with 128MB of RAM.

Inside the PAC 65

The chassis is pretty much the same, except a few minor alterations…but they exist for a very significant reason. Although the baby AT form factor standoffs remain, it isn’t a motherboard screwed onto them…it’s a PCI/ISA backplane board. Weird industrial/embedded stuff, but fun! In this arrangement, the “motherboard” is actually a “card” known as a single board computer which goes into a slot on this backplane board (which is largely passive, no smarts on it). The backplane ‘breaks out’ the single PCI and ISA interface of the SBC into multiple slots so cards can be added to the system. The unit has a 12.1″ 800×600 SVGA LCD.

The PAC 65's CI6BM SBC

The processor this SBC takes is in slot 1 form. The manual documents up to 8x100MHz, and I have found a BIOS update to include P3 support, so a P3 800 is possible using the original motherboard. It takes PC100 SDRAM and has two slots (max 256MB per slot, for a max of 512MB for the system). It has two IDE interfaces (for two drives each), a standard floppy drive controller, an onboard NIC (obscured by the case, though), two serial ports, one parallel port, two USB ports (header pins on the board, requiring a bracket to be used) and lastly, onboard VGA (Trident 9520, including the integrated LCD output).

PCChips M748LMRT baby AT motherboard

My original intentions in obtaining a Dolch luggable were to get it, strip out the original cards and motherboard, and plop in a board I have waiting (PCChips M748LMRT: baby AT form factor, Skt370/Slot1 combo, AT/ATX PSU options, 3 slots for SDRAM, up to 10x100MHz Coppermine processor support, full set of onboard features – but would reuse the PCI video card from the Dolch in the single PCI slot)…this has been complicated by the fact that the unit I got has the single board computer setup instead of a more traditional motherboard (which would have included the PCI VGA card).

One might ask then, why did I get the unknown PAC 65 when I know the PAC 64 has what I need? Unfortunately, PAC 64s are more commonly seen with Cherry MX mechanical-switch keyboards, and certain keyboard enthusiasts will spend multiple times what I paid for my entire unit for the keyboard alone. To me, the keyboard is of much lower importance, but obviously must be present for the unit to be useful for my purposes. This ended up being an unexpected bonus for me: my unit has a previously undocumented laptop-style scissor-switch keyboard with a pointing stick. I happen to be a fan of the IBM Trackpoint so this works well for me…especially since I have suspicions this is in fact an IBM OEM keyboard. I was able to get the unit (complete and 100% functional, in good cosmetic condition to boot) for $45 plus shipping which is way cheaper than they often sell for.

Now…on to what you may be coming to expect from me: photos!

The standard directory on my web server can be found here, but keep in mind that these are not downsized/compressed as much as I typically do, and there is no thumbnail display, so you may want to consider visiting this page instead. One of my buddies is graciously hosting the pics for me.

Furthermore, there’s a video. I was requested to do a take-apart video so here it is on Megavideo (I’m told that depending on your browser, this site may have malicious content – sorry for my choice of hosting there, but as it took something like 6 hours to upload, I am not moving it), and just as with the pictures, my buddy is also hosting a mirror of the video right here.

Enjoy…and if you have any questions about the unit, please feel free to ask.

Cisco 3660 router with 3524XL switch

Not really inline with the overall theme here, but whatever. Recently my college was donated a bunch of Cisco switches and routers from some company (I don’t know who, or I’d call and say thanks) and the college decided the best use of the equipment, being somewhat dated, would be to distribute it to deserving students who plan to do their CCNA, CCENT, CC-whatever exams in the near future.

I ended up with a 3660 “Multiservice Platform” router and a Catalyst 3524XL switch.

Cisco 3660 Router

Both fit a 19″ rack. The 3660 is a whopping 6U and has two built in fast ethernet ports, redundant PSUs and six NM slots. The 3524 is 1U and has 24 fast ethernet ports with two GBIC sockets. The 3660 has two NM-1HSSI cards presently which I doubt I’ll use.

Cisco Catalyst 3524XL Switch

Because of the electricity consumption I’m highly unlikely to “use” these boxes at home…at present, my network is pretty functional and I don’t really care to mess around with it. I will likely practice certification-relevant stuff on them, of course (and I hope to do my Cisco one/ones this coming summer after some hardcore studying).

When I move out (still living at home) I’ll probably get a rack and set these up doing some real work…get a NM with WIC slots, then get either a cable or DSL WIC (or hell, both) and make them an integral part of my network infrastructure. I don’t plan to do any sort of gigabit migration for quite some time so they’ll definitely be sufficient.

In the meantime they’re just eating space in the basement…but I realize that I kind of lucked out here. Definitely want to make use of these machines, even if they’ll have to wait a bit. Right now priority #1 is getting a rollover cable and making sure they actually work ($3 ebay special is in the mail right now). From there I can worry about NMs, WICs, GBICs and all that good stuff.

I’ll leave you with some pretty (alright, mediocre) photos of my newly obtained goodies:

3524XL inside

3660 back

3660 fans

3660 mainboard. Flash SIMMs at far left, PC100 SDRAM middle-left, PCMCIA slots at right with AIM (Advanced Integrated Module) and TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) slots above.

Wyse Winterm S30 thin client, turned web server

A while ago, I bought a Wyse Winterm S30 thin client on eBay. Unimpressive in specs (366MHz Geode, 128MB DDR333, 64MB IDE flash), but impressive in form factor, and certainly usable.

I bought it with the sole intent of running some kind of Linux on it to host my website (previously kishytech.tk/kishy.comuf.com, now kishy.dyndns.org). It started to look like a lost cause when I realized this device lacks a configurable BIOS setup menu, and that the boot sequence puts the internal flash module first (optionally, network PXE can go first, configured by software). I figured there was no way to USB boot it and so largely gave up.

Edit January 2011: guess what, it DOES have a setup menu…but you have to repeatedly hammer on Del until it comes up, instead of either holding solid or a single press. The default password is Fireport. Although very simplistic, it offers more than enough flexibility:

Wyse S30 Setup Menu

Fast forward a bit to yesterday…I was kinda bored. I pulled the thin client out of the drawer, plugged in a USB floppy drive (containing a Win98 boot disk), and tried to boot it. I noticed the drive made a brief seeking sound before going to WinCE, which suggested to me that maybe the BIOS *is* USB bootable…so I removed the flash module and tried again. Success! I repeated the test with my USB/IDE bridge and a CD-ROM drive and found it successfully booted several items. The logical conclusion is that it could also boot from a flash drive…so who’s to stop me installing an OS on a flash drive and booting from that?

The ISOLINUX bootloader hangs up on the thin client, so I plugged the flash drive into a more conventional machine and did the install there (the minimal install of Debian). Re-acquainted myself with the Linux CLI for a bit (had a college course on it, but have never used it outside of that), figured out an irritating network issue (the minimal install doesn’t include a DHCP client, and the Realtek ethernet chip oddly shows up as eth1 instead of eth0). Fixed those, installed my needed packages for SSH/SFTP access and a basic web server…good to go.

A caveat, of sorts: the thin client does not retain the date/time at poweroff (not much of a problem for a server, but with no UPS it’s conceivable that it will go down). For this, I’m using ntp and ntpdate (grabs the time from an internet server shortly after startup).

The hardware is fairly slow, and since it’s running off a flash drive, I opted for no disk swap (the write cycles would murder the drive quickly), so performance is not the best for anything that involves “thinking”, plus my connection is kinda slow, but it seems to be quicker than the free host. Not to mention the electricity savings over running a “real” server…Wyse rates these for an average of 6.6W (the power brick is rated to draw a max of 1.2A, which is around 180W, but I believe this brick is not original Wyse equipment). Works for me. Edit later: I’ve confirmed it indeed only draws about 6W at idle.

These devices can be found at very reasonable prices from time to time, so it’s definitely a project worth looking into if you’ve wanted to do something similar. If nothing else, I can stop depending on Imageshack to randomly delete my images…and a free host who may go down at any time…and I get further Linux CLI experience in the process.

IBM 6016730 keyboard

I recently obtained one of these beauties…well, mine isn’t quite a beauty, considering the rusty springs and pitted/corroded metal bits inside, but the layout is great and the case is in good shape. It is of the Model F style, meaning it uses buckling spring actuation of a capacitive switching mechanism. The feel is described by many as superior to just about anything else, but I prefer the Model M type (cost-reduced, buckling spring with a membrane instead). Nevertheless, I’m interested in having this usable.

Myself being the sort of person that I am, I’m working on getting this usable on modern computers (or, hell, computers in general). It’s originally for an IBM dumb terminal…which specific terminal isn’t known for certain yet, but there are strong indications it’s for the short-lived first generation of 3290 from 1983. Maybe not. 5080 graphics terminal?

IBM 5080 Graphics Display

If you’d like to see more pics of the beast (the keyboard, not the device it connects to – I wish I had more pics of that), feel free to check out its directory on my website.

Now, since I’m not exactly an EE guy, when it comes to identifying the discrete components and the function of assorted pins and lines, I’m definitely getting a lot of assistance from a few very knowledgeable members of geekhack.org. Whether or not this conversion ends up being doable, I’d like to thank you for your assistance (both in helping get it going, and the chance to learn some things along the way).

More to follow as progress is made. Some things have been determined at this point (location of Vcc and gnd, what some chips are, that sort of thing) but not enough to post yet, so stay tuned if you’re interested.

Edit: I’ve concluded that I don’t have the resources to make this workable. Accordingly, I’ve sold it at the cost I obtained it for to someone more capable…and am putting the money from it towards a more expensive, but known-workable option.

I’ve got a decent variety of stuff to post so the coming weeks should include some interesting back-content. Stay tuned. And check out kishy.dyndns.org if you haven’t yet :)

286 online

If you’ve got an old box in the basement that you’d like to do something with…here’s an inexpensive project for you. For quite a while, I’d been itching to try to do something networky with my 286 (pictured as the header banner for the blog, currently). Dug up a NIC (details further down), looked for drivers/utilities, went from there. The machine is a 10MHz Intel 80286 with no coprocessor. It has 2.6MB of RAM (motherboard plus an ISA expansion card), integrated VGA graphics, and an Adaptec SCSI card with a 1GB drive installed (overkill for sure, but it’s what I’ve got to work with). The NIC I ended up selecting is a D-Link DE-220PT which is 10baseT Ethernet, has boot ROM capabilitity (but no ROM present on mine), and exclusively uses twisted pair (not even an AUI port).

I had been running Windows for Workgroups 3.1 (not 3.11 – this is a 286) on top of MS-DOS 6.22 and fighting to try to get the NIC to play nice. It seemed that I had the driver installed and working, however there is no TCP/IP stack in WfW3.1. Trumpet encountered fatal errors (perhaps due to running out of RAM) and the Microsoft one I was able to track down wouldn’t tolerate a 286 (386+ only). In retrospect, trying to do this with Windows wasn’t the best idea to begin with because of the extremely limited RAM.

So, I decided that it’d be better to do it with MS-DOS, and if I felt like it try again with Windows later. Essentially, the process to do this in MS-DOS is:

• Obtain suitable NIC and install it. If you’ve having difficulty finding one, at least at the time of this writing I have 3 suitable cards, tested and working, available for reasonable prices.
• Obtain MS-DOS packet driver for your NIC or a compatible one and install it (very likely, just a matter of running an executable with some switches or perhaps adding the driver to CONFIG.SYS). If you’re having difficulty tracking one down, try here, they have a bunch.
• Find software…in my case, I use IRCjr (an IRC client, part of MTCP) and Bobcat (text mode web browser, some altered form of Lynx) and get it onto the machine
• Configure the software per the documentation. MTCP as an example has very clear, concise instructions for the configuration file you must create. Bobcat is practically a nightmare for the user who seeks only to get the config file written and immediately jump into the program. I’d recommend giving this (PDF) a look over because it describes the basics of what need to be in the configuration file for anything WatTCP based (as is Bobcat).
• …go, it ought to be working

The basic principle involved here is that the packet driver stays resident in memory and provides an “interface” to the NIC through which other software can talk.

The next machine I decided to do this with is an XT (well, sort of). Actual IBM 5160 motherboard, 4.77MHz AMD 8088, 640KB of RAM in a baby AT tower case. I’m using a Paradise VGA video card, Western Digital/SMC WD8003W ethernet NIC, and the Vintage Computer Forums’ XT-IDE card for my hard drive interface (but committing some horrible crime, because I’m only using a 130MB drive with it). I don’t have a high-density floppy controller for it so all file transfers were done by putting the hard drive in another machine, transfer the files, then put the drive back in the XT. This is one area that the XT-IDE card really shines in…no proprietary low level format, as is common for 8-bit IDE cards.

Similar process, with one caveat: the WD8003W only supports the 10baseT ‘draft

CentreCom 210TS AUI transceiver

standard’ on the RJ45 port. It will not play nice (or at all) on a modern 100baseT or even 10baseT network, so you’ll end up needing an AUI transceiver. The beauty about this, one might say, is that if you have – for example – a 10base2 network (ThinNet) for your vintage boxes, you could get a 10base2 transceiver. I ended up getting both 10base2 and 10baseT transceivers…there is no difference to software, so which you use is purely a matter of which you prefer. This is the eBay listing for the 10baseT transceiver I bought.

With that out of the way, I was able to do the same stuff software-side to get the 8088 box online (IRC is tolerable, but even text mode browsing is like utter death on that machine…).

Ultimately, this is not something you’d do for functional reasons (performance is just too bad, text mode browsing is too crippled, security could be a concern, etc) but, if you’re the geeky type, may find entertaining if you’ve got a free afternoon. Enjoy!