Well, it’s been an exciting couple of days.
I arrived home from work yesterday to find a huge pallet sat on the driveway; I guessed it was the M25 from Johannes in Germany.

It was starting to get dark, raining, and the package was heavy. I had to quickly break apart the packaging and removed the printer and VDU to a safer place. Next we carefully moved the M25 off its pallet and because the casters had been removed, we “walked” the M25 it into the garage and out of the rain.
Now safe and dry in the garage, the first task was to get the front and back covers off the machine. I thought I was going to have to drill off the locks as there were no keys, but as it happens only one of the four locks had been secured and a quick “yank” pulled the front cover lose.

It was immediately obvious that the machine had been used in an exposed workshop type environment as it was very dirty inside. This was actually a selling point of these machines as they didn't really mind the dust or room temperatures. Removing the plate retaining screws, I managed to remove all the plates, disk drive, SMC and FD drives and Power Supply which made the chassis a lot lighter and easier to relocate to my workshop.
There’s a fuller description on how I serviced the machine elsewhere on this site, but after cleaning and some basic testing, the machine was reassembled.

After some fiddling around I managed to get the system to boot and joy of joys; status 26 was output on the CPU display which means “VDU does not reply”. Since there was no terminal connected this is exactly what I’d been hoping for, then, I hit a small problem.
I opened up the package that contained the VDU and discovered there was no keyboard. This is a problem. Without a keyboard, I can’t start the VDU and so can’t boot the computer. So, for now, I’m stuffed. For those that are wondering, it has to be a Nixdorf SAS keyboard for a DAP4. I’ve left the VDU in the garage for now until I can sort something out.

In the mean time I moved the ND11 printer in the workshop and promptly dismantled it, vacuumed it out, cleaned it, and put it back together. Loading some continuous stationary and pressing the test button produced the expected test page but it’s obvious the ribbon has dried out and I’ve not been able to fine suitable replacements yet. So, I squirted some WD40 onto the ribbon; just a quick spray every 3 inches or so on the ribbon tape. Once I’d been right round the ribbon I re-installed it in the printer and re-ran the test print; it was much better. The ribbon needs time now for the WD40 to migrate evenly over the ribbon material which will happen on it’s own over the next few days.

It's been an exciting 24 hours but it looks like I'll have to wait a bit longer before I can attempt to boot the machine properly.

One of the things I’ve been after is an actual 8870 machine. I regularly search EBay and other auction sites and often spend several hours surfing the net trying to track down old equipment and information, and you’d be surprised what turns up if you kick enough rocks over.

A couple of months ago whilst looking for 8870 pictures, I stumbled across a picture that somebody had posted to an automotive related bulletin board and asked, in German of course, what sort of computer was shown in the picture. Well, it was an 8870/M25 with a DAP4 screen and what looked line an ND11 printer. Unfortunately the post was rather old; May 2010. However, nothing ventured, nothing gained so I sent Johannes an Email, asking if he still had the computer, and he replied a couple of days later that he had, but didn’t know anything about it.

So, I replied telling the basic history of Nixdorf, and a little something about the computer he had, and, if he would be willing to sell it and what I intended to do with it. To cut a long and very happy story short, yes, he would be willing to sell it.

Now Germany isn’t really that far, but it’s amazing how difficult it is to arrange to get a box the size of a small refrigerator from German to the UK. The shipping company wanted to know the dimensions, weight, required that it be securely mounted on a pallet and then boxed up.
Johannes of course is a busy chap, and it’s not fair to expect him to bundle the machine up like that, but, he offered. I will be eternally grateful for him doing this as the only other solution was for me to go there and get it. It would be cool to have pictures of the machine as it was found and packaged and then shipped and Johannes has taken lots of great pictures. It also shows how much work he’s had to do to get a pallet, cut it down to size and then pack everything in as tight a space as possible.

Today I received an Email from Johannes telling me that the transport company will be collecting the computer tomorrow and it should take between two and five working days to get to me.
From what I’ve seen from the all the pictures, I’m not overly confidant that the computer will be actually working, and getting spare parts is almost impossible. However, there are only really three things that can go wrong; some more serious than others.

The 8870 uses a completely propriety VDU and communication protocol, so if the single supplied terminal is faulty, I’m not going to be able to boot the system. There’s a good chance that any large electrolytic or X2 capacitors in the main PSU have dried out, or that the hard drive has either become corrupted of gets damaged in transit.

The simplest of these to rectify are dried out capacitors. It’s just a simple matter of finding replacements of the same specification. A faulty VDU may be repairable depending on what the fault is, but a dead hard disk is a real problem. Remember that all hardware is proprietary so it’s not a matter of finding a disk unit that’s compatible with the controller, its finding a drive that capable of behaving exactly like the original drive. Then there’s the problem of locating an operating system. Johannes has checked and there are no backup tapes stored with the machine. Still, no point in worrying about it just yet.

The plan is once the machine arrives to photograph it, and then strip it down. This will be a bit of a challenge as we don’t have the cabinet keys for it so I’m going to have to drill the locks out. I’ll then remove and open up all the plates and clean out all the dust that always accumulates. Next I’ll remove all the fan modules and clean them. I’ll also open up and clean the PSU. Once that’s all been done, I’ll replace the PSU and fans and switch the PSU into service mode. Hopefully with the load from the fans, the PSU will start up and then I can check the voltages to make sure it’s running within expected parameters. I’ll leave it running like this for an hour or so to make sure there are no small explosions. All being well, I can then reassemble everything and attempt an IPL.

However, working or not it's a great find and will give me a chance to document and photograph the hardware.

Watch this space.

I’ve been accused of being a horder, and I am to a degree.  No, I don’t fill the house with old newspapers going back to the 1960’s but I do tend to acquire a fair amount of technology, and a lot of it usually isn’t in prime condition.  Just for the record, I don’t store my acquisitions in the house. I have a large garage and a new custom built workshop for that. But I have unfortunately, in the past, thrown things away that were obviously never going to be needed again… until now that is.

When I stopped working with the 8870 in the early 90’s, I kept some of the technical documentation that I’d religiously carried around for many years. During the heavy rains In 1998, we were unfortunately flooded and since the insurance company placed a skip on the drive I took the opportunity to fill it with things that I would never need. Whilst I’ve been searching around for 8870 documentation, many people have told me that they’ve only recently junked the stuff they had.

If you’ve got some old computer technology at home (and I don’t mean some old PC graphics card from the 1990’s), but perhaps for some reason you kept that old deck of punch cards (new or used), or some manual from an old mainframe, don’t throw it. At the very least, if you must get rid then put it on Ebay; and it probably won’t even cost you anything. Please don’t deprive some geek working all hours some valuable piece of information that they will pay for. You also have the pleasure of knowing that your junk is being recycled and going to a good home.

Oh, if it’s 8870 / Nixdorf related items, please contact me first :-)

Actually, that’s not fair. Google can translate German, it’s just not very good at translating technical German.

I have two 8870 manuals that are key to understanding exactly how the 8870 works under the hood as it were. The NIROS manual (version 3.3 for now), and the Field Engineering Manual. The problem is they are in German, and my German is rather limited.

My partner Heike, is German by birth, so I printed out the NIROS 3.3 manual, sat her and the manual down and said, “you translate it, and I’ll key the English into my laptop… should only take a couple of hours”. It took around thirty minutes to get a half decent translation of a single paragraph. The problem is Heike doesn’t know technical German and her translations were too literal. This is exactly what Google’s language tools did. I decided I was going to need help.

I went to the Internet huning around for an independent or freelancer who would take pity on my, and translate my 160ish pages for the price of a bag of peanuts, but I didn’t have much success.

What I did stumble across was a website Freelancer.co.uk and the concept is rather simple. You create a project that defines what you want doing, your specify a budget range and let people ask additional questions or bid to do the work.

So, I created a project, uploaded a low-ish quality scan of the manual for bidders to see, set the project bidding stage to run for 10 days, and sat back really expecting for nobody to reply. Within 10 minutes I’d had several offers ranging from the peanuts I wanted to pay, up to £250 (which was my maximum). I also had one chap ask if I was serious as he charges £30 per page; odd really, I didn't force him to bid. The next day I had a look and had around 15 bids for the job. The site on-line help advises you not to just decide on price, which makes sense but what DO you use to help you decide.

I remembered than when Heike and I tried to translate a very simple passage we got into a terrible mess. So, I sent the four lines of German to my friend VAXMAN and asked for his translation. I then picked four bidders based purely on gut feeling, and if the English they used in messages they had sent me, appeared half decent, and asked if they would translate the four lines for me.

After 48 hours, only one person replied, and she replied almost instantly and her translation was pretty accurate; well,good enough for me anyway.

So, Ioana in Romania is currently in the middle of translating my NIROS 3.3 manual. We’ve agreed a price, and the work will be divided into five equal parts. I get to see the quality of her work, and she gets paid after each part. Stage payments are all handled by the Freelancer website so it really is quite simple. If she does a good job, I’ve got another couple of thousand pages of manuals for her to translate as well. Lucky girl.

One thing my emulator is going to need to work, is an original operating system. If we were talking about Windows, DOS or even CP/M, then it wouldn’t be a problem. But were talking about a propriety 15+ year old operating system from a company that no longer exists and used on a single range of computers which are all but extinct.

So it’s lucky that when the company I worked for after working for Nixdorf went out of business, I spent my final minutes there on-site (we really didn’t get much notice to vacate the building),backing up my 8870 development system, and I kept the tape.

The problem is that these 9 track half-inch tapes don’t age well if they are stored in less than ideal conditions. The tape is actually made from a plastic material with a magnetic coating bonded to it’s surface using a hygroscopic glue (absorbs moisture from the atmosphere). What all this means is that if you start running an old tape through a tape drive there’s a good chance that the tape is going to fall apart and be ruined.

Lucky for me during one of my scouring the Internet for information sorties, I found VAXMAN. Go check out his site. We started Emailing as you do, and I happened to mention my problem with the tape, though I was more worried that I didn’t have an actual tape drive to read it on. VAXMAN offered to recondition the tape (by placing it a nice warm oven for a while which apparently doesn’t damage the magnetic coating or the data), and the reading it’s contents onto one of his VAX machines. He could then spool the data into a tape image that I could then read.

I got an Email from VAXMAN the other day saying the tape had arrived, but it may not be good news. Whilst the tape is physically intact there appeared to be a lot of parity errors when the tape was read, but hopefully, theres a good reason for this.

The 8870/M45 I used to create the tape had a Cipher 880 tape unit installed. These can read/write at either 1600 or 3200 bpi. Unfortunatly the tape unit that VAXMAN uses works at 6250 or 1600bpi. The Cipher default is 3200bpi so this could explain why it can’t be read. It’s not all bad news as he does have other tape drives that will do 3200bpi, but it’s not a simple job for him to reconfigure all the hardware.
Another problem may be the “mode” that was used to write the tape. The 8870 supports two modes of operation; streaming and start-stop mode.

Streaming mode is used for fast system backups. The problem is that tapes written in this mode weren’t designed to be read on other manufacturers systems. I’m not saying hat you can’t read them, it’s just that usually, if we were writing tapes for other manufacturers computers, they had to be written in start-stop mode. My tape is a standard system backup tape, so was written in streaming mode, so it’s possible that the tape is perfectly fine, it’s just that I need an 8870 to read it on. It could also be that the tape is completely knackered. I’ll wait and see what VAXMAN suggests as to what to try next since he's got the hardware... and all the work to do.

It's been a bit of a battle getting this far, but at last, this site is up and running. Whats a bit of a shame is that I can't seem to post blog entries in the past. A lot has happened up to this point and I really need to find some way of documenting everything that's happened. As it happens I've already got some fasntasic news to write about but I'll drop that in a new posting. So, welcome to my blog, I hope you enjoy, and please, feel free to comment.