On Sun, 30 Jan 2022, Jeffrey Brace via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Maybe others want to chime in on what they were working on.
I was only there on Sunday. My project was to evaluate the two HP 3000 Series 30 systems owned by System Source. One system was an empty cabinet, but the boards and cable were eventually located. I populated the card cage with the requisite boards, and added the necessary cables to connect to the system console and serial terminals, and the HP-IB devices (disc, tape and printer). On power up, only one of the fans turned on, and there were no DC voltages. The boards in the card cage are: Bus Interface Controller CPU Firmware PCA Maintenance Interface GIC (General I/O Channel, HP-IB interface) GIC ADCC Main (Asyncronous Data Communications Channel) Memory Controller 128K Memory Array 128K Memory Array 128K Memory Array 128K Memory Array I switched to the other system, which had some of the boards installed. This system powered up. The +5, +12 and -12 DC voltages were within tolerance, but the +5M, +12M and -12M memory voltages were absent. There are two boards in the memory power supply which are suspects (the fuses are okay). Back to the original system, I found a blown 3A slo-blo fuse. A search for a replacement yielded nothing on hand (or at NAPA Auto Parts). I elected not to swap the good fuse from the second system, since that was the only one we had. If, after obtaining new fuses, the power supply on the first system comes up, we could consider swapping out the memory power supply boards. Substituting a modern power supply is also a possibility. The CE manual lists the the power requirements for the memory supply as: +5M 5.0A +12M 3.5A -12M 0.38A I also checked out the 2621P terminal to be used for the console. It powers on, passes the self-test, displays correctly and types in local mode, and the integral thermal printer is working. The battery which maintains the configuration is dead, and should be replaced with a Mallory TR133 or equivalent. A cable to connect the terminal to the system console must be obtained or built. The cable part number is 13222N (13222-60001). If you're building one, the diagram is on page 22 of the Terminal Cable Handbook: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/hp/terminal/5957-9918_terminalCableHbk.pdf A longer cable is part number 92217A. There are currently one of each listed on Ebay. System Source also has two 7970E tape drives (1600 bpi), two 7925 removeable pack disc drives (120MB), two 2631A printers, and a 2608A line printer. All of these can be connected to the HP 3000 system, and will need to be evaluated. There were no disc packs found for the 7925 drives. If they cannot be located, disc emulation via HPDrive would be an option. I had a PC with HPDrive installed in case testing got that far, as well as 9-track tapes to load MPE-V/R. Another ribbon cable is required to connect an ADCC Extend board to the ADCC Main board, to add four more serial ports. The part number is 31265-60002. To make one, you would measure the contact spacing on the upper ADCC frontplane connector and obtain two 50-pin edge card connectors and a short piece of 50-pin ribbon cable. The cable connects the upper frontplane connectors on the ADCC Main to the ADCC Extend board to its right. Mike Loewen mloewen@cpumagic.scol.pa.us Old Technology http://q7.neurotica.com/Oldtech/