Cannibalizing 36xx's

[Seibert@WHITE.SWW.Symbolics.COM]

    Date: Thu, 3 Oct 1991 14:53-0400
    From: miller@cam.nist.gov (Bruce R. Miller)

    Well, after years of faithful service they've decided to surplus our
    beautiful old 3600 as well as three 3640's.  Amongst the four of them,
    all the `boxes' work, but 3 consoles are dead and 1 marginally works (I
    was able to tweek the picture straight, but its too wide. If I try to
    reduce the horiz width enough, it it goes out of sync)  

    It's a shame for these to completely disappear.  I'd love to have one
    for my home workstation.  It would have been nice to buy the scraps and
    assemble something.  But the way government surplussing works is a bit
    mysterious.  I cant directly buy it; I suppose that the idea of one of
    the original users buying it back may appear suspicious.  And it's
    impossible to establish if/when/where the things would show up at
    the auction.

    My alternative was to keep them from surplussing the one working 3640
    and use it as a home workstation.  It's got 2 140MB disks, and so can be
    shoehorned into a standalone mode with a small lmfs.   Of course NIST
    will no longer pay any money to modify or repair it.  And since I wont
    own it I dont want to spend anything either!  Plus, since the console
    symptom looks like a fading component, it may die soon anyway.

    So, the Q's

      1) The box says 20Amp, and has the old huge power plug. But there aint
    no way that's drawing 20 amps.  (is there?) Anybody know how much it
    really draws? 

If it doesn't have any special boards in it, it should pull about 10 to 12
amps on power up and then drop to a nominal current of 6 to 8 amps.

      2) I need to connect to the outside world -- in particular back to
    NIST.  The 3600 has one of the newer 9track drives and built-in modem.
    If I cannibalize these from the 3600, is there anyway that they can be
    attached to the 3640?  They dont have to be internal (the '40 already
    has the 2 drive slots filled), they can sit on top of the cabinet for
    all I care.  

      3) any opinions on the monitor?  BTW: It has the monitor where you
    remove the full case; the other 2 (broken) ones have the removable top
    panel --- I forget which is which philips/moniterm -- in any case it
    would appear that I can't mix & match between the three to get a healthy
    monitor.

The monitor you describe is a "Symbolics" monitor as we call them.  It was designed
during the Derry Dynasty and I believe it is incompatible with the older style 
monitors (older moniterm and philips).  If the tube is still good, you should be
able to fix it for a reasonable price.  The power supply has been the culprit is
some monitor problems in the past, but Doug Evans could shine some light on this.
(Hey Doug!)

    Any other comments are welcome.
    Thanks for your indulgence in my self-indulgence.

    bruce
    miller@cam.nist.gov