[rescue] Re: NS FIP 3.3 boot floppy images?

[Skeezics Boondoggle]

On Sat, 26 Jun 2004, James Rice wrote:

> In my experience, the 486DX4-100 in the object.station will blow the 
> '040 in the Turbocolor out of the water, but the Sparc 5-110 will run 
> both of them into the ground.  All of them are running the same version, 
> NS 3.3.  I have no experience with the HP "green" hardware. I still 
> prefer "black" hardware.  Kind of like running BeOS on a Daystar 
> Genesis.  It's a lot faster but not really the same experience as a real 
> BeBox.

Ah, so you *are* on the Rescue list - your Canon page came up near the top
on my Google searches.  Excellent collection you have going, and very nice
web site - I have been slacking for years on putting some pages together.

I kinda figured the '040 with its memory interleaving, I/O ASIC, and 
better integration might at least keep up for non-CPU intensive stuff, or 
that maybe apps that make use of the DSP might seem zippier on the '040.  
But I've heard that the SPARC and HP performance really does leave the old 
CISCs behind... I'm just excited that n years after the fact I can try out 
one of each and see for myself. :-)


> You might want to watch the Varta CMOS batteries on the object.station 
> closely.  Both of my  object.station batteries started leaking.

Thanks for the advice.  I found another article about the power supplies
having a tendency to "short 120VAC out the mouse port," which kinda
freaked me out a little.  But there's really not much info about these
machines out there.  Anyone know how many were sold?

Do you (or does anyone) have any lower-level technical documentation about
the motherboard, specifically some of the jumper descriptions?  On my unit
nothing on the front lights up - and there's a grey wire just hanging
loose inside.  The fan on the right side of the vertical PCI (er,
ISA/VL-bus??) riser was almost disconnected after being bumped by the SCSI
cables - I found with a flashlight a 12V pin and hooked it back up and it
spins now.  Not real scientific, I know... Even some close-up pictures of
the internals of a stock machine would be helpful in making sure I've got
things plugged back into the right spots.  :-)


The sad thing is, this machine came from one of the very small number of
shops in Portland that used NeXT machines extensively.  I was shocked when
it booted Windows 95, but more surprised to find how many odd little
changes or tweaks they'd made (possibly to get it to run Windows)...

I need to go install the NS 3.3 Y2K patches now - poor thing thinks it's
still 1994, and setting the clock by hand to 2004 jumps it ahead to 2094.  
Heh.  Kinda makes you wonder if by 2094 Windows will catch up to where
NeXTstep was in 1994... :-)

-- Chris