===========-/\/-[ D I G I T A L D R E A M Z ]-\/\/-=================
[ I. ACQUISITION ]
I recently acquired a DECstation 5000/200. I had spotted it on ebay,
and as it turns out, the person was local to my area, and has an
entire warehouse full of old Digital Corp. stuff! He explained they
were in business back when DEC was still around, and are to this day
still selling DEC gear to an existing customer base. Since then they
also started selling medical hardware for supplemental income.
We didn't talk very long, as I knew he had an errand to run when I
went to go pick up the machine, but interestingly, he also remarked
that they sold new computer gear for a while, but the old retro gear
was actually selling better, so they pivoted into medical equipment.
I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise that retrocomputing is bigger
than contemporary computing, since modern commodity hardware is not
particularly built with longevity in mind, and is otherwise mostly
unremarkable.
[ II. HISTORY ]
If you're not familiar with them, DECstations were released around
the same time as the more widely known VAXstation. While VAXstations
could run both OpenVMS and Ultrix, they were more widely used with
VMS typically, where-as DECstations never ran VMS. They were purely
intended as UNIX workstations, and as-such only initially shipped
with ULTRIX as an operating sytem option, with OSF/1 later added as
an alternative. As it turns out, ULTRIX is a BSD!
[ II. PERIPHERALS ]
The deal was for just the machine, but I was able to get him to also
give me a keyboard with the required keyboard/mouse splitter cable.
That's kind of important, because these machines have none of the
standard peripheral connectors you'd expect. You can't just plug a
PS2 or AT keyboard into these things, let alone a regular ps2 or
serial mouse. Nor is there a VGA connector for the monitor.
Haven been given a keyboard and keyboard/mouse splitter cable saved
me the trouble of having to figure that out at least, but I did not
have a monitor cable.
The decstation 5000/200 has a 3W3-3BNC connector for monitor output.
Cables which convert this to VGA exist, but the only one I found on
ebay was selling for several hundred dollars. No way. I did find a
cable that breaks out the 3W3 connector to 3 regular female BNC
connector, so I went and got that instead. Then I found a cheap-o
cable elsewhere, that does BNC to VGA, typically used with CCTV
equipment. I hooked that into a monitor with sync-on-green, and lo
and behold, we had visual! I still feel like I kind of lucked out
here, because that could have been a lot more complicated.
The DECstation does not have any internal storage. No hard drives,
no floppies, nothing. It does have 2 SCSI connectors on the back,
and originally they sold a "Storage expansion" box, with a HD that
you could hook up to your DECstation over SCSI. That box was the
same size as the computer itself (No really, it used the same case,
it looks like?!) -- I used a regular-sized external scsi hard drive
enclosure, and that seemed to work fine.
I was also able to order a suitable DEC mouse for this system for
relatively cheap thankfully, so that took care of that as well.
Interestingly, these had some very odd puck mice available, with
pressure 'nibs' on the bottom to detect movement instead of the
classical ball. I did get a puck mouse, but it came with a normal
ball, somewhat dissapointingly, but whatever works!
[ III. ULTRIX INSTALL ]
Okay, got video, keyboard, rodent, and storage sorted. So now to get
an OS on the thing. I figured that'd be a breeze, but of course, I
was very wrong.
I hooked up an external SCSI cdrom drive to the SCSI bus, and it
was able to recognize the drive and load the ULTRIX installer, so
off to the races, I thought? NOPE - After choosing the basic or
advanced installation option from the installer menu, the installer
would bail and crash with a CAM error, mentioning the SCSI bus ID
corresponding to the cdrom drive I was installing from.
After lots of trial and error, online research, and banging my head
against my desk, it turns out ULTRIX is <extremely> picky about the
type of CDROM drive you use. These things were released at a time
when CD drives were relatively new, and not particularly ubiquious.
According to one source, they required drives which read in 512 byte
sectors like a hard drive, instead of the standard 2352 bytes of a
contemporary cd drive. I tried several drives, even ordered a drive
capable of 512 byte sector output, but NONE worked.
I had to give up on the idea of installing from CDROM and instead
install from one hard drive to another. Unfortunately I did not, at
the time have another SCSI hd enclosure, or enough parts to make one
so I had to wait on more parts. Then, when I did get the additional
enclosure, I had to figure out how to get the installer image on
there. The only other machines I had with SCSI ports are my SGI Irix
boxen (An octane and an indigo2) -- I was able to detect the drive
from IRIX but IRIX does not let you write to sector zero of a drive.
It seems, for a device to even get a device node, it must have a
volume header. And you can't then write to the beginning of the disk
or you blow away the volume header. Weird chicken-egg problem there.
And here I thought I was a dd copy away from victory. Thus I ordered
a PCI-E SCSI controller card to stick in my modern PC. Unfortunately
when it arrived, it seems it had the wrong connector type (A VHDCI
plug instead of a HD68 or HD50) for which I did not have a converter
cable for, and worse, my machine wouldn't even recognise the card in
`lspci` -- sigh. -- Ordered ANOTHER card of older vintage with the
right connector. But this was a PCI card. My modern PC has no PCI
slots. But no problem, I thought, I have plentry of retro machines..
Yeah... so,... I have a Pentium 200MHz MMX machine - I popped the
card in there. Now I needed an OS with drivers and dd copy available
- so I did what any reasonable person would do, and popped in a GNU/
Linux install cd... and found out that i586 support in contemporary
operating systems is near non-existent, especially on a pure MMX cpu
- There was a few retro-linux distro's I could get running, but
none of those had the drivers for the SCSI card. And the newer OSes
which did have drivers, did not support the i586 CPU. -- I found out
the hard way that there are many operating systems which CLAIM to
support i386 or newer, or i486 or newer, but actually don't. Missing
conditional-move (CMOV) instruction support was one issue. But there
were other problems. One odd page I stumbled upon mentioned there
can be instruction set incompatibilities in stuff written for pure
MMX pentiums leading to problems not exhibited in both older and
newer generations. Dunno! NO IDEA - whatever - Lucky me I guess. :)
Eventually I remembered that the asterisk box running my phone
system had some PCI slots, so when I popped the card in there, and
was able to boot a modern linux, I was finally able to perform the
dd copy onto the donor drive. Whew. All of this was a process that
took several months.
Installing from one hard drive to another got me passed the point
the installer would crash at when installing from cd. I wasn't quite
out of the woods yet, because after it rebooted from the target HDD
and started the second stage of the installer, the ULTRIX installer
crashed after trying to mkfs the partitions it just created. ULTRIX
does not let you alter the partition layout during installation, and
it instead uses a set of hardcoded partition sizes for the default
set of system partitions, and then uses the "rest of the disk" for
the /usr partition. As you can probably already guess, "the rest of
the disk" being the problem here, as it's dumb enough to create a
partition larger than the size it can handle (2G), resulting in seek
errors during newfs invocation. Thankfully you can drop to a shell
and manually resize the bad partition with chpt and then resume the
installation.
At the end of installation it asks if you want DECWindows MOTIF or
DECWindows X11 - I picked MOTIF, as it's fancier, and eventually it
dropped me into the familiar pretty DECWindows login screen.
Unfortunately though, after logging in and being dropped into the
desktop, things kinda broke. Trying to launch DECTerm would freeze
it. I then re-did the entire install process again, and picked X11
instead, and now things work as expected. Maybe it does not have
enough memory for handling DECWindows MOTIF? No idea, I'm just glad
it all finally works!
[ IV. EPILOGUE ]
I will be bringing this machine to VCFMW this year so people can
play with it. Speaking of which, I'm also working on my BBS again a
bit in preparation for the show. Joe is going to set up a hunt group
for me so I can bring a modem bank and support multiple concurrent
dial-ins at the same time. Meanwhile, I'm still working on adding
UTF-8 support so people can dial in with a regular linux terminal
emulator instead of needing a dedicated BBS client that supports
ANSI and CP437. I will also try to build some type of enclosure/box
to hold all the USR modems together physically, with some cable mgmt
done ahead of time, because last year turned into a horrid spaghetti
nightmare. Lots of stuff to do, lets see how far I get! ;)
