My ND11 printer ribbons arrived today. They seem to be OEM ones as there's no Siemens/Nixdorf or any other company name on them, but they fit and work perfectly.

I've set some program listings running and the sound of the ND11 running brings back sooooo many happy memories.

For those of you looking for Nixrdorf ribbons, these ones were listed for an ND10, but fit the ND11 and so should also fit the older and slower ND04 printer as well.

I'm amazed that companies still stock these things and now I know they fit, I'm tempted to buy a few more just in case.

Needless to say, I've now found another supplier in the UK that was half the price of the place I've just used

If you've got an ND04 or ND11 printer (these were the most common printers in the UK) and it's been hanging around the place for a few years theres a good chance the ribbon will have dried out.

Now at a push, you can add a little bit of WD40 to the ribbon to reactive it. I've done this with a couple and it's worked and whilst it was better than nothing, it's not ideal and at some point you're going to need replacements.

In the UK, you can get them here:
http://www.tillrollworld.com/rollstore/Nixdorf_4563__ND10_Black.html

In Germany, there are several suppliers.
Do a search for "10600003204" and Drucker and you should find several places that have them in stock.

Because terminals are in such short supply; at least, in the UK, I’ve started looking at the 8870 <> DAP4 communication protocol. The hope is that I can over time, build a reasonable terminal emulator. My own DAP4 does some odd things from time to time and as I suspect it’s not long for this world, it makes sense to try and complete the emulator as soon as possible.

This morning I attempted to start the 8870, but it just sat there hunting for an operating system. Everything had been working fine before I shut the system down last night so I’ve no idea what has happened; possibly the disk drive is showing its age.

Anyway, I loaded one of the DC600A SMC back-up tapes I’ve previously made and attempted to recover the system from it. It took only a few seconds from inserting the tape for the system boot menu to appear on the VDU. I’ve run a re-format of the system LU, and restored the operating system without a problem. Unfortunately, I’ve not been doing regular backups so I’ve lost some of the German to English translation I’ve been doing but that’s just an inconvenience and nothing I’m going to lose any sleep over. At least I've still got a working system and servicable backup SMC tapes.

A word for those of you that may have to attempt a system recovery from SMC for yourselves.

I’m going to document the procedure more fully soon, but when the transfer of the operating system from SMC to disk is complete, the system appears to hang for a couple of minutes. Initially I thought that the system had locked up half-way though the restore process (the block counter was showing 193-ish at the time). It appears that the nice operating system is actually rewinding the SMC tape; hence the delay. It would have been nice if it displayed a message saying that everything is fine and I’m just tidying up for you, but you can’t have everything.

Anyway, whilst the SMC drive LED is on or flashing, be patient.

I think today is site-maintenance day. I've started to accumilate a lot of information and so I'll spend today formatting everything for the site.

By using the disk drive on loan from Jim (see previous posts), I’ve managed to boot my 8870/M25 system. There appears to be a disk error at some location as for some reason, I couldn’t backup the operating system (LU#00) to a DC600A SMC tape. It would re-try four times at the 9 min and 5 second mark, before throwing a read/write error. I tried several tapes but got the same error at the same location. The drive has been in storage for nearly 20 years.

In desperation I tried a backup to an XLP300 SMC tape (I’d tried this before and the SMC drive made some very odd sounds). This time I used a different tape and hey-presto, the backup completed without error.

I re-installed my disk drive, inserted the SMC tape, cold-started the 8870 and the system boot loader menu appeared and I managed to recover the operating system from tape onto my drive.

The system then re-started and only complained about the memory configuration.

In the mean time, I had sent Emails to everybody I could think of and posted a question in the Nixdorf group on LinkedIn to see if anybody could remember the Niros 7.0/03 sys-admin password.
Com'on... it's been a while you know.

Somebody replied and I now have sys admin access. It's amazing how much I've forgotten.

I’ve re-configured the CORE memory size (thank heavens that SYSMOD is in English), added printer support to port #0 for my ND11 dot-matrix printer, and everything is working great. Workstation program 20 seems to support the DAP and ND11 printer ok. There is an issue with the keyboard being in German which I need to correct at some point (Z and Y key are wrong way around) and I remember that it's done with a program TPCODEUTIL... I just need to figure out how it all works again.

I’ve rebooted the system a dozen times or so over the last couple of days, and it’s clocked up around 20 hours of run-time without any problems.

The ALME had a single V24 card for port #0, and I’ve added a second one which I’ve used for a connection to a PC for very basic file transfer.

Yesterday, I spent the majority of the day translating the Manager and Expert selectors into English, and patching the MESSAGES and TF.PARAM files. My German is almost none existent so thank heavens for Google translate. It's still very slow going and my translations arn't great.

As my one and only working DAP terminal has a very slight fault (I think one of the capacitors in the HT section of the PSU is leaky as the picture keeps jumping and fading in and out slightly from time to time), I decided to also started looking at the protocol used for DAP to 8870 communication. DAP screens seem in very short supply and so if I can construct even a basic terminal emulator, that will go a long way to ensuring the continued running of the system. If I can get an emulator working, it will also allow Jim to boot his system as his DAP terminal is faulty.

I’ve also managed to make several system backups from my drive to DC600A tapes without any problems, so I’ve got operating system copies on XLP300 and DC600A tapes all over the place… you can never have too many backups.

Jim currently has my spare disk drive. My plan is to get that back, restore the operating system on that drive and make sure it's ok (that gives me two working drives), then I can risk running a format on his drive and then performing a restore.

The other thing I want to do is a CLEANUP of LU#00. If that works without any problems I suspect that will be a good indicator that the hardware is working perfectly and there are no drive errors.

Thanks to a nice chap on LinkedIn in the Nixdorf group, I've at last found out what the Niros 7.0/03 sys admin password is... it's "TEAM"

Ok... now were making progress...

It’s been a difficult couple of days trying to get the M25 running with the drive from Jim.

It did boot when I placed it in my chassis but it complained about the memory size and then started picking up housekeeping errors and deleting files. This is a common story with these drives when they’ve been left idle for many years.

The system eventually booted and I was pleasantly surprised to see it was running Niros 7.0/03

Attempting to log-in using the administrator password failed with password not recognised. The Manager and Expert logins worked ok, but not the administrator. I’ve tried every password I can think off but so far, I’ve not been able to figure it out. Without the admin password, I can’t reconfigure the system with SYSMOD/CONFPROG and because Niros is running its emergency minimum configuration, many programs won’t run correctly and the system is very slow. I also don’t have any printer support.

So, I decided to carry on with the tasks that I should be able to complete; backup up the drive to SMC as it’s a forgone conclusion that this drive will fail sooner rather than later.

The first problem with this task is which SMC tape is required. I’ve been accumulating every type of SMC tape I can find and I’ve now got a box full of them.

I first tried an XLP300 tape. The system really didn’t seem to like this. Next I tried a DC600A and I had a lot more success with this.

I managed to format the SMC, and then set about running a backup of LU#0. At 9 minutes and 5 seconds, the progress counter reset, and started again. It did this a total of four times before announcing that there was a disk error.

I tried another SMC just in case but it threw the same error at the same point in time.

The error shows three numbers and I assumed that one of them was the disk address giving the trouble.

I decided to copy all none operating system files off LU#0 onto LU#1 and hopefully leave LU#0 with just the basic operating system hoping that I would encounter errors whilst moving one of the files and that would show me the exact location of the disk error. Unfortunately this didn’t happen. All files were copied and then delete successfully.

I then took a gamble and ran OPINDEX on LU#0. This ran without any errors.

I tried the backup to SMC again, but I’m still getting the read/write error.

The good news is that the system continues to boot without throwing any housekeeping errors.

I’ve sent some Emails to people and am waiting to see if anybody knows what the admin password may be for this system.

I’ve got more screen-shots that I will upload soon.

Out of the blue, I got a message from Jim Austin, the owner of a substantial computer collection up near York in the UK. http://www.computermuseum.org.uk/

He had acquired an 8870/M25 and needed some help getting it running.

After a brief Email exchange I managed to figure out what the chassis contained and it seemed like he had a working DAP4 terminal. When he’d attempted to boot the system, it had replied with a status 26 on the CPU display (VDU does not reply). I arranged a visit as I was eager to see if this was really a running system and had a copy of the elusive operating system I’ve been looking for.

I supplied him with a cable diagram for a DAP4 master port (why oh why do people just shear through cables when removing old computers), and he attempted to boot the system but was having problems.

In my previous blog posts I’ve mentioned that working VDUs are in serious short supply. Out of the four I have, only one is working and that is a little temperamental so I was very reluctant to bounce it half way across the country but in any case, from what Jim has said it looked like his VDU was working.

I arrived at Jim’s impressive place, and Jim, his friend Trevor and I wandered off in to his warehouse to have a look. The 8870 was stood there looking like a tiny box among some of the behemoth machines Jim has in his collection.

The first thing was to start the terminal and make sure it had the correct keyboard parameters entered – the VDU refused to work and my heart sank. York isn’t exactly close and it was a very long way to go to look at a faulty terminal. I opened up the terminal, removed the CPU card, checked for anything obvious, reassembled and tried again; still dead. The PSU seems to be working but the CPU card looks like it’s faulty. With no VDU and no spares, and the fact that you can’t boot the system without a Nixdorf terminal, that seemed to be that.

We did start the machine and as expected, eventually came up with status 26 – there was an operating system on that drive, and it was at least partly intact.

Jim suggested that I take the drive away, install it in my hardware and see what it contained and I left Jim my spare disk unit that I’d brought with me.

So as not to waste the trip, I gave them a guided tour of the hardware, opening up the PSU, battery backup and other system plates for them to see how everything was constructed. The machine was reassembled and I hurried back home to see what was on the disk drive.

As it happens, Jim’s faulty VDU appears to have been a blessing in disguise, as it’s given me the opportunity to bring his drive back with me, and work on it at me leisure.

I'll write more soon on how this is progressing, but it's been full of ups and downs, and it's not over yet, but so far, things are looking promissing.

I never really planned how this site would be created; it just evolved over time and because of this, it's started to get in a bit of a mess so I'm in the process of updating it, and adding more content. So, sorry about the mess and any broken links whilst I re-work everything and move things around.

Hopefully, it will be a lot more usable once I'm done.

A common issue with these machines is that when they are decommissioned, the people just cut through the VDU cables making it very difficult to get the system working again once you’ve relocated it.

I’m just in the process of documenting the cable connections for a V24 with Remote Switch-on for the master port, and a standard 4-wire IHSS cable assembly.