On 11/16/2015 04:13 PM, Oliver Lehmann via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Bit more about what the background of my question is:
- I own a Zilog System 8000/21 but neither do I have a harddrive for it nor do I have a working tapedrive or any tape medias. - A friend of mine also got a Zilog System 8000/21 lately but his harddrive is broken (heads do not find track 0), and his tape drive capstan went to "gum". He got a noriginal Zilog ZEUS (Zilogs UNIX) tape media but with the broken drives no way of backing it up or retrieve at least its contents. - Today I found out, that another enthusiast from a local university also has a System 8000/32 (newer than /21 with SMD harddisks) in the uni museum. He has a dying harddrive, a working tape drive but no media.
You see... lots of "missing", "dying" and so on....
Hello Oliver, I think you and I discussed Zilog System 8000 stuff many years ago. I had a Model 31 for a long time, back in the late 1980s. It was a great system. Its only real drawback was the lack of networking capability. I still miss that system, but I sold it before I became old and sentimental. I currently have a Model 21, but its hard drive has failed (it's the SMD version) and the tape drive roller has predictably turned to goo. I will address the roller problem at some point, when I start to dig into the system. Otherwise the system comes up and executes its ROM-based code. It is very important that ZEUS install tapes be preserved. They are, as you have observed, nearly impossible to find. This was the "largest" application for the Z8000 processor architecture, and it's exactly the application it was designed for...it was used in lots of other places but couldn't really "shine" in those areas. For example, I have an EDAX system on my electron microscope that uses a Z8000 running ROM-based code as a coprocessor for number crunching. The Z8000 has significant strengths for multitasking and timesharing applications, and ZEUS on the System 8000 family is, to my knowledge, the only place it was taken advantage of. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA