[SunRescue] Sun 3/110

[BSD Bob]

> Hello all.
> Im glad to hear that Im not the only one playing with an old Sun 3/110!

Mine is purring along fine on SunOS 3.5, in retrocompute mode.....(:+}}...

> (BSDBob). I rescued my beast from a UCSD surplus auction in early July
> along with a couple of big ol' Sun 511 scsi cases each with full size
> 150MB Micropolis 1355, which I plan to replace with one 411 box and a
> 1GB drive or so... Anyway, Initially it wouldnt fire up, but after
> cleaning the caked crud off the CPU board it came to life! My plan is to
> install SunOS 4.1.1 from the sun 3 archive(sun3arc.krupp.net). My
> question is, before i build a boot tape, will this machine boot from a
> QIC-150 cartridge? I dont have a QIC-24, only a QIC-150 drive. Heiko's
> Sun3 page doesnt seem to say anything about this particular creature...

When you take the 511's down, DO SAVE all the misc. cabling and boards.
They may be useful to you later.....(:+\\..... if you need them.

I don't think the roms in it are late enough to run an 18 track tape.
Maybe one of the old hands knows for sure.  The 3/80 series can, but,
I don't recall, offhand any of the earlier 3/xxx series doing so.
Also, if it needs to run a tape, you probably need to find one with the
scsi/qic bridge board.  It may be possible to run an Archive scsi 60mb
drive on it, but those seem to be relatively uncommon.  Since mine
resides in a deskside 12 slot case, it already has access to the
MT and MD controller boards.  IFF you hook up direct scsi drives and
don't use the  MD controller, you may find that the scsi drives don't
address as you think....  mine addressed at 0, 2, 4, etc.  I am not
sure why, yet, but it may have to do with the kernel/controller/device
configuration (I need to check on that on a spare machine, sometime,
although one of the  old hands may know  for sure, too).

The SunOS 4.1.1 works great, including the update 1.   Since I wanted to
play some with F77, I decided to retrocompute to the SunOS 3.5 level.
That works fine, too, but is a little strange to bring up the first time.

On the thing coming to life..... check and reseat any loose or corroded
chips, and the keyboard/ethernet fuses.   A little pin corrosion is a
lot of real pain in the whatskies.  On unknown surplus boards, I take
a little thin screwdriver and unseat one end of a chip slightly, then
reseat it, then repeat on the other end.   That is usually enough to
rub the contacts and make the connections electrically sound.  We used
to do that all the time in the old S-100 bus days.....(:+{{.....

> I'd appreciate any comments! Thanks in advance.
> Kurt Nowak

That is all I can think of offhand....

Bob