[rescue] Wang machines

[Dave McGuire]

On January 15, Rick Hamell wrote:
> 	I've got an old Wang machine sitting at home. In the furniture
> vein, it's done duty as a coffee/end table. :) 
> 
> 	Does any one have a good site for identifying this thing? I had
> hopes of hacking the case and filling it with a bunch of PC boards or
> Older sparc machines and making it into a Beowulf cluster. I'd hate to
> ruin something like this though. 
> 
> 	The machine has no part numbers that I can find. There are no
> labels on the outside other then the word "Wang." It has a 5 1/4 inch 360k
> floppy drive, a full size hard drive with again, no labels on it! There
> are 5 system boards, each is about 4 ft sqaure and slips into it's own
> rail. Examining the boards I believe that two are processors and the other
> three are memory boards based off of chip numbers. :)
> 
> 	Externally there are about a dozen BNC connections that are
> numbered. I assume those are the terminal connections? (I think it may be
> labeled that way.) The machine sounds like it boots up, and the hard drive
> moves for several minutes then quiets down. Thanks in advance for any
> pointers!

  This sounds like an OIS...a multiuser word-processing system based
on a Z80.  Is there a Z80 on one of those boards?  Also, those BNC
connectors...I'm betting they're paired, with one BNC and one TNC
connector in each pair.  These are the terminal ports.  These are
pretty neat systems if you can find a terminal for them.

        -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire
St. Petersburg, FL         "Less talk.  More synthohol." --Lt. Worf