I bought 1970s Data General Mini Computers!

that's a big computer hi I'm Shelby this is my youtube channel tech tangents and I have a down in general now actually two data generals I recently picked these up after finding out that they were available for sale locally and I did everything I possibly could to get these I actually had to drive these about a hundred miles to get them back home which really isn't too bad that was very close for something of this obscure nature so I'm pretty happy with that but oh boy am I excited because these are definitely not your common computer collectible and they are super super cool so today we're gonna take a look at what these are what I'm going to be doing with them and yeah some general information but before we get too far into this I'm actually going to go back in time now to before I got this all prettied up because it took a lot of work to get these transported here now these computers were originally located in Tucson which is really close to me because I'm in Phoenix but it still meant that they had to be transported about 100 miles and I wanted to be as cautious as I could about making sure that they didn't take any damage during that time so I tried to do as much research as possible before going there on how I should protect these things and felt fairly confident that I could do it when I finally got there I really wasn't able to film anything because it was just one other person to myself were able to go and pick it up so standing around with a camera didn't really make a lot of sense because there was a lot of work to do I did take a lot of pictures though mostly as reference I had to disassemble the computers to put them into my van partially because of the weight the big cabinet probably weighs about 500 pounds when it's full and because I wanted to make sure that the hard drives were in the correct orientation when they were transported I didn't want to turn them on their side or on their face or anything just in case the change in gravity could potentially do something bad to them thankfully the original owner was very accommodating and gave us all of the time we needed to pack the computer up and I'm very grateful for that because it made life so much less stressful than knowing we had some kind of hard time limit where we needed to get out ultimately I'm pretty happy with how everything was packed for the trip and I don't think anything took any additional damage from being moved I'm fairly confident that all of my research paid off except for one possible thing that we'll look at later alright so since this is currently open let's go ahead and take a look at some of the specific things that we have going on here because there's there's just a lot so we can better see some of the hardware that's here and that will make identifying things a bit easier now I do have all of the plates as you saw there just currently sitting on top of this rack and I will be putting those back on in a bit so the next step that I need to do right now is reconnect everything so that it is in the condition that it should need to be in when it's used now I'm not going to turn it on and I there are many many reasons I'm not going to be turning it on I'm not gonna turn it on in this video I will eventually but not in this video for sure if there's something that's wrong with any one of these parts that are in here and it could potentially damage other parts I could never forgive myself because this has the capability of working still and I need to preserve that as much as possible and I just I need to make sure I don't make any mistakes now let's talk about some of the other parts here so obviously the 8 inch floppy drives these are all metal I mean I don't know if theirs would get picked up on the microphones but listen to this that's that is a metal door floppy drive that's insane also eight inch floppy drives I have a box of 8-inch floppy discs that I got up there with it somewhere probably up there some documents that came with this and included in there is an 8 inch boot disc for this now I haven't really talked about this yet these it's it's difficult to define what is and isn't a computer but this rack right here is a micro Nova that is one computer and this rack right here is another computer a nova 4x now I'm very happy that this is a nova 4x this is the highest configurable memory version of the Nova and I could potentially max it out to 256 K I'm not a hundred percent sure how much it has in it right now I think it might be 32 or 64 K or as they would have rated it then 32 killer words words are a very dumb unit of measurement for memory but anyway I think it has 32 killer words you can see here that there are cards so let me just pull out the card here this is the CPU for the Nova 4x and Wow and I'm serious this is just a CPU there's not like one chip out here this is a CPU technically it's these four chips that are the CPUs operates for four bit CPUs in parallel to function as a single 16-bit CPU which is just crazy one of the cool things about this whole thing though and especially the long term repair ability and continued use of it is that there aren't any chips on here that I've been able to identify that are totally unique one offs two data general except for this chip right here which I believe is an EEPROM of some sort that contains micro code for the CPU so outside of that one chip if any of these others are bad like say this but what I believe is memory most likely if any of those are bad I should be able to replace them so there's that which is very nice and I'm a little concerned about all of the hand wired Bob wires on here as well take a look a little bit later in this I have a binder of service and repair notes that are actually from dad general from this machine so that may have been stuff that was done during its service contract but yeah still concerning see this is a hard drive this is a hard drive and this is a hard drive this is going to sound crazy but and I need to double check this with the model numbers that are on the back I have not recorded exactly what all I have here yet but I believe this will have a five megabyte discs this will also have a five megabyte discs and this might be ten megabytes so there's 20 megabytes total there and then these two drives actually have removable platters so that's what this is if I open this up we can see the platter inside of the cartridge here and you go ahead and insert that in there and then you can read the data with it we'll get into the specifics of why this isn't in there right now but one interesting side effect of these having removable platters is that I can see the heads right here and the heads are retracted which is how I was able to pull this out this was installed in one of these and with the heads retracted I know that they're not damaged there's actually a little rubber piece here even that separates head so they don't bounce into each other and the thing about these is so I mentioned that these have removable drives or removable platters these have two sets of platters there's a platter underneath of this part as well you can actually see those heads in addition so yeah this is a very complicated computer oh yeah it's the micro Nova works in much the same way we have cards here and each one of these has a different function so the micro Nova seems to be a little better equipped than the Nova four and I was told that they use the micro Nova more so that could explain why but yes I need to go through test all of these like it's just a lot of complicated stuff going on here I will say there's one board in the Nova 4x that is not here that would have been nice to get but isn't the biggest problem there was a dedicated multiply and divide Hardware math board that was available for this that this was not fitted with so at some point I would like to try and track one of those down but none of this stuff is common or affordable so I don't know how likely that is but yeah that's something I would like to do okay now let's see here anything else before we get going on well I should talk a little bit more about the terminal this terminal this is like the most gorgeous piece of computer hardware I've ever seen in my entire life this is this thing is just ridiculous I mean the CRT pivots on that hand wow that is so pretty I know a lot of people are all about the keyboard and frankly I think that's a waste of time and effort to try and get one of these keyboards working it's just a foam in foil keyboard I don't think the keyboards the attractive part I think the keyboard works well with the CRT but without the CRT it's this is just a big ugly keyboard now there's one cool bit of unique history for this computer in particular well this terminal in particular and that is this this is a keyboard cover for the dasher terminal here and what's cool about that is that there is a one and I mean there's one of these in the entire world because the company that formerly owned these was in the textile business and they made this for their own computer terminal so it's just really cool to have this data general branded keyboard cover for the dasher terminal and it's the only one I mean I don't I'm never a fan of things that are exclusive and impossible to get but it's cool that they made their home so I really enjoy that that's that's a fantastic piece of history to go with this computer that really summarizes who was used by so okay I think I have covered just about everything I can from the front so we should probably move on to the back now where there are a number of other things to talk about now I had the forethought of when these were put in and put down an artificial floor a little bit it's a 3/4 inch piece of plywood with a piece of carpet over it so these can actually move I will have to do a little bit more than just lean on my chair to do it so I can pull these forward and then I can get behind them unfortunately I have to ever so indignantly crawl underneath my desk to get to the backside and then vary the both of these actually have a door that swings open to protect the rear side and I'm going to have to pull these out about 18 19 inches and then remove the doors and put them somewhere so I can get to the backside because the doors open this way of course if they open that way wouldn't be a problem but no they opened the other way I'm gonna have to do that but it's gonna be well worth it so as of right now oh I didn't really cover that when I transported these I removed all of the hard drives now I didn't just lock them I read to remove them because this was going into a passenger van a consumer great van not like rented van or anything and in order to be able to load these in the racks had to be situated on their back well this one didn't end up having to be on its back this one certainly did and I also thought it was important not to change the orientation of the hard drives but turning them on their side or anything like that could potentially lead to issues so I didn't want to do that I locked this drive pulled it out put it on there and just kept it flat the entire time so I actually removed this hard drive of that hard drive this hard drive and the floppy drives I left the computers inside because I they don't have too many parts that are going to be damaged by movements so I left him in there also left this one in there just in case the added structural rigidity in the middle of the case was helpful because this had to be tipped back and then slid into the van so that was I felt important to do but yeah everything had to be removed which mean I had to undo all of the cables and connections in the machine for the peripherals and now I'm going to go through and reconnect them I documented everything to the best of my ability there were some things that had to be taken out in the heat of the moment because these drives they're insanely heavy seriously I think there are between 160 and 180 pounds each with the platter removed and this thing's also heavy on its own spry ways it's well let's hope Stanton diner phase 60 this was about 5 pounds so even that would have contributed significantly and really the only thing that's in there that has any weight is the platter so each one of these has a platter in it as well it was very heavy so this one I ended up having a bit of an issue with because I didn't know how to remove these so it turns out none of these are really high up this one's locked because you can screw it into the front there's no reason ever pull those from out unlike these have the removable but anyway this one kind of see the rail down here so these actually rest on the rails and then are screwed in the screws almost only act as a way of keeping the rails in line with the machine as you pull it out they physically lay on the rails as you put them in I didn't know that I'm used to my modern servers where you're able to undo latches and pull the rails through and when that didn't work I had the foolish idea of attempting to remove the rails from the rack while the drive was still installed because I thought I could pull them through or finagle them in a way where I could come through ultimately that was a fool's errand and it led to no no permanent issues I believe nothing fell or got damaged or anything like that the top of the floppy drive got a little bit scratched up unfortunately but if I can color match this paint I can go through and correct that and really won't be able to see it anyway when it's closed but the rails I did save them they were not damaged in any way but it just made my life horrible and I had to unplug some cables that I didn't notice at the very end actually I think that was no I wasn't on this but I I don't know it's just I need to go through while I have everything in my head about where the cables were plugged in and documented and the documentation means something to me because right now I can look at the pictures I took oh that's here and know that that's where that cable needs to go back in I think the orientation of one connector may not have been documented so I'm gonna have to look at that but for right now yeah it's time to get behind these and start taking a look at the cables okay this is gonna be kind of rough cuz the best I've got is an 18 millimeter lens and I have no space between the wall and this I mean here's this light and my hand side so you get an idea of what's going on here so the hard drive the base hard drive here has this ribbon cable that's very very long goes down to this Picard edge and that starts out by getting wrapped around this piece of plastic up here I can't our drive forward but then it connects to this piece here this gives it enough slack so the hard drive can move forward during service when needed down here we have the Nova 4x and if I hold the power supply to the side here it's it's caught on something what is it got all its zip tied up here great I have to cut that there we go that was one of the things done for trains it's protected because this is intended to use some come on there we go so intended to use these weird screw retention things and they don't work great anyway back in here I grab that line I showed earlier you can see that there is the backplane I have again a manually focused camera and that the connectors are sometimes literally just hand wired onto there actually this one looks pretty good the micro nova has some that are hand wired but yes so those big wide connectors on the back are how the cards are interfaced with now the hard drive card and I believe well both hard drives have these cards over here on the side and these big wide connectors have to plug into those that's the internal interconnect so that you can remove the hard drives with the cables if need be so I have to reconnect both of those there is the serial terminal interface board right there and then down here is the other hard drive now the hard drives are kind of weird because the hard drive itself is there in that but then it has this interface board here at the hard drive connects to I think this converts it to a more standard type so this is the hard drive interface connector down here to move down that light again so you can see it off to the left there I'm guessing that's the standard hard drive interface and then this is an adapter board to make it work with the data general disk controller so there's that all right on to the micro Nova now you can see some hand wired interconnects in here actually the floppy cables in the way now there's some that are sort of visible so that's how the micro Nova works the power supply I believe is that there so I'm going to on both of these have to take a very in depth look at the power supply the terminal seems to be what was connect or was connected to this it looks like because I believe that cable goes off to the terminals connector the terminal is a doctor I'm not sure if it's a detune or not actually I think it might be just a Dasher but it uses this as the interface it's the EIA connector is what this was using and that's the keyboard connector I love the controls for setting the connection information that's that's really nice okay now this can be pushed forward that's the hard drive widen this out again this one does also have the interface board but it's on the back of the drive this time so you can undo this and I think it would swing potentially but anyway yes that's that yeah and here's the floppy drive and the floppy drive has two individual connectors here they are one for each drive and I'm going to have to reconnect those okay is there anything else oh yeah this oh these are weird so both of these have non-standard power connectors at the base and there's an internal power distribution system this one I believe takes in 110 and outputs 110 or 120 whatever all of the power supplies are listed in here as using on 120 volts so it's the standard US power spec even though the connector is very strange I think it was most likely due to the age of well the the way that the infrastructure would have been built in the building's when these were released that the typical US outlets were not capable of carrying as much power they mean they could have had aluminum wires and trying to draw that much current through there would have been a bad idea so this might have been designed free to use a higher current wiring that was known to be better and that's why they did that the other one though oh the Nova 4x case is using a totally different connector and this one I believe is 240 so that kind of sucks so I can't use this this does have an internal power distribution thing it's it's down in there grab that light again there you can see it that standard us outlets and again everything on here is just 120 here we go the no before oh that one it's either interesting okay well the hard drive here we go 120 so I'm probably going to bypass the internal power supply on this one but I might try and get it working on this one now interesting if I grab the micro nova back panel here we can see a circuit diagram of how the internal power supply or power distribution network is wired up so it should be totally possible to determine what the pin out of that port is and get or make a cable that works with that so that's really nice oh look a errant screw down in there hug figure out what that goes to so I think that's dark and pretty much everything there is to talk about on the backside here so I need to go through and reconnect everything like the hard drive connection and figure out what's going on now give you a rough idea well of why it's going to take me so long get this going let's focus closer you see inside of that great those are some ridiculously massive capacitors I'm going to have to take those out and attempt to manually reform those to make sure they don't explode or anything crazy I want to try and power this up for the first time so that's one of the reasons why I'm not going to be powering this up anytime soon as there are a lot of those in there I mean the hard drive you can't see it from this angle as another thing like that another giant capacitor that is just terrifying so I'm going to have to really go slowly and test everything one at a time here all right now I'm gonna get started reconnecting all of the wires all right all wired up and I'm very happy with how this turned out so this was a bracket as I mentioned used to hold this cable in place and it was originally a zip tie that goes through these holes but I wasn't as big of a fan of it like that so I used this cable tie from LTT store calm and a little just twist tie on the loop side going through it that way it can't go anywhere and I'm not using the twist tie to hold the cable on I really don't have an objection to that but when I did my server video server video a lot of people gave me grief about that there is a second one down here and this all gives the hard drive enough slack to roll out of the system here as you can see moves out so that's pretty good I need to add a little more slack to the power cable arrangement though one more thing I found that was kind of interesting so there has been this bundle of cables at the bottom of this most of these Brown cables that are just a total nightmare of really poorly done wiring not that it was poorly assembled it's just all kind of crammed inside of here for storage and it's just made my life a little bit more difficult but I separated out this particular cable because it turns out it's not part of this Bummel wire so one interesting thing here both harddrive connectors are pinched in this and the serial connectors here which is what I believe these are are pinched in this one so these cards must be the interconnect cards for the hard drive controllers and the async card all of the cables for this one go to this bundle and then up to the top and then on this one so that's the top card which I believe is the async card so that makes perfect sense but this cable here is separate and goes to I believe the CPU card down here I almost accidentally pulled this out which would have been very bad but at least iPhoto documented everything and now I'm video documenting everything but anyway I'm gonna guess that is the parallel port although there are only three pins what on earth could that be with three pins now that I realize that that is very very strange okay well I will have to investigate that later my guess that's I didn't notice that that's weird alright well anyway let's see from here from the top you can get a better look at giant capacitor in there yeah that's boom good I got the micro Nova all set up correctly the hard drives folded back you got it lock it here and push it forward it's now this is something that I'm really not sure about let me grab that light brought it up in here now the owner said when we're disassembling this that it had to be powered on to be pulled out now I'm guessing this it's activated by something inside the computer or inside the hard drive to lift this up because this comes back and latches on here you can see the markings on there so I'm guessing that this is lifted after the spindle stops spinning so you can remove that platter from inside and this is used to make sure that you don't do it or don't release it pulled out of the wrong time similarly over here we have a sensor all right makes a lot of noise there that is used to detect when the hard drive is closed and it goes up against this I guess they put this tape around there to make it a little bit softer so that's part of that whole system so I bet that this is meant to be powered on to be a release but you would have to it would be part of a program for like disk park but for data generals interestingly over here if we look at this hard drive we have the same release there even though these are different model hard drives turns out this one is a 60 95 and this one is a either 60 45 or 60 50 because it's labeled two different things and we're really sure which one it is I'm inclined to go with 60 45 because that was probably put on by a data general employee I don't know the difference yet so I'll have to look that up but anyway somebody plugged the closed sensor with this piece of cardboard I don't know if that's just because they're missing the bracket goes on the rail down here or what but this one will always think that it is running ooh that needs to be corrected I don't know if that would have happened because of me or them mmm that's to get that sometime but anyway outside of that everything else is doing pretty good I'm really curious about this so this is the backyard for the 60/40 550 and on here as I didn't mention this well it's on the back of the drive and this is the cable that goes to it now weirdly this cable actually goes down to the floppy drive first and then comes back up to the hard drive the apparently the floppy drive goes in the middle I haven't actually connected the floppy drive yet I'm gonna have to pull it out on the front whoops and do that from the other side we'll do that in just a moment but yeah that's that's different thing so apparently these are daisy chained I didn't realize that the first time around cuz I unplugged the hard drive from here and then unplug the floppy drives and turns out this cable just goes between both directly which is very very weird but yeah so there's that everything else though is fully reconnected the power supply for the back of the four you put in and you twist the screws and then it locks in place so that's nice and managed but I think that's pretty much it for now time to go back to the front make it pretty and get the floppy drive reconnected alright now before we can call this complete I've pulled off the side panels for the micro Nova here and we're gonna pull out the floppy drive hopefully the cables in the back here actually I can hold them as I pull this out I need to reconnect the cables inside the drive here this point okay disconnect it hopefully it just pulls out with these four screws I don't remember but I need to internally reconnect the data lines for this you have to do this from the front unlike all of the other drives which you can access on the rear kind of annoying but whatever and we'll get to see that pass through that I forgot about her didn't realize when I was doing this the first time believe that's all of them yes that's fully moving bingo that's some serious circuit board right there that is very very large these would be the connectors or the to drive that ones tugging on the circuit board a little more than I would like but well not a lot I can do about that and you can see that I've labeled this in such a way that I cannot screw up reinstalling these now I can put this in again and then there's one more thing I need to do before buttoning this all up okay now from here unfortunately it's hard drives slightly misaligned it's a little higher on this side than it is on this side because I took out the rail screws but that's some will have to look at fixing later is it bowing out it's weird it's on faceplate shouldn't oh all right wow I can do about that anyway I'd put on this rear piece its was taken off because the floppy drive rubs up against it and that's bad oh I wanted to make sure didn't get broken while I'm moving it around so I had to take it off now I'm gonna put it back on and then we can put on all of the remaining trim pieces close to done now there are just six more pieces that need to go back on all of them are trim so let's start off with one of the more important ones the Nova for front panel now all of these front panels just fit right in place there are little metal latches that keep them on and then you have to pull on these and just the right way that I haven't quite yet deduced to remove them there are these little metal things that poke through but not 100% sure if those are exactly how you're intended to do it but it works so yeah let me go ahead and put this one on there we go so that's the Nova four front plate power switch lock and then reset and whatever PR load is I'm not really sure but we yeah definitely live it leave that off even though it's not plugged in and then we have the fixed disk now unfortunately the fixed disc has a slight problem the label is peeling off which has led to this weird corner and it happened on the inside so you can see as I put the plate on it's all inside that after it's very very strange but there's those two the labels are peeling off of it this one's expanded it gotten wider and it poking out in the middle it's very strange but then we have the two metal blanking panels one goes up here and the other goes down below and there we have it all assembled oh wait two more pieces at the very bottom of the case as part of the power distribution system we have these two air intake vents down here and there are dust covers that go over them this one is slightly broken there supposed to be two little metal tabs that snap in place this one's broken off if only I knew of some way to easily repair plastic mmm I think I'll do some research on YouTube to see if I can find a way but anyway that will be taken care of later but for both of these I found something rather hilarious in the documentation when I was going through it originally so I mentioned I have service records for these computers that actually from their data general service contracts really awesome but one thing in particular that I'll get a close-up shot here of is this now this is a note that reads your data general computer installation site has been inspected by data general service Inc and it is felt for that for the reasons indicated below your systems performance may be affected unless corrective measures are implemented we cannot be responsible for the reliability or serviceability of your equipment and the reason is under environment excessive dust and dirt now I haven't actually I don't think I've seen another set of cases quite like these that have these integrated air filters and if we take one out you can see that it is indeed very very clogged yeah there we go very dirty so it was clearly quite an issue for this system I will pull these out and clean them before putting these on but but yeah it's just kind of funny that not only is it dirty I have a letter from data general saying that it was dirty oh okay there we go the setup of nova 4x RAC and the micro Nova RAC now two things I want to address here very quickly I'm again not turning either one of these on in this video or the - our terminal these have been powered off for so long and are just so difficult to replace parts on that if I turned one on and something went bad in it I might not ever be able to fix it so I'd really need to be slow and fastidious in how I do this just be extremely careful now another thing why am i shooting at this really unpleasant angle for these well this room isn't big enough to have the camera in front these matter of fact if I move my hand off camera well just imagine my arm okay at arm's length it's that much more to the hi-fi wall and then the depth of the shelf so that's it there's not a lot of space in this room and this orientation I could have tried to put it that way but this cabinet is 32 inches deep so it just eats floor space for breakfast it's bananas this thing is huge but that's that's a rack it's that's how it works honestly I'm a little impressed that it was only 32 I think my other rack the shark rack that I did a video on a long time ago it's actually 40 so yeah it's 70 inches tall these are not measurements I made before I picked this up I asked for some measurements so these are the measurements I would give it I was given so 70 inches tall just for record I'm six-two so there you go that's about it looks about right on the camera monitor but yeah that's that's pretty much it so now that the whole thing is assembled I actually can't pull out the removable platter drives unless I pull it forward and go on latch the back this drive isn't it's actually removable if I pull off the front panel and undo the screws there are some cool stuff to see in these but I don't think this is the video to be doing that in this is just meant to be a general introduction to having picked up a Nova and give you an idea what I done did in order to transport this stuff matter of fact actually I do need to pull this out because they need to unlock the spindle and heads so let's go ahead and take a look at that because that's that is very important that I remembered to do that then this drive is locked in with two screws this is actually the the lighter of the three drives being fixed disc this has two platters inside you can actually see them from the side which is really really cool because inside of here the hard drives themselves are sealed in a piece of acrylic or something so if you look in these vents you can actually see the hard drive in there I don't know what it would take oh yeah some unusual fasteners I might have that in my eye fix-it kit but yeah I don't know underneath is what we really need to be looking at right now actually I forgot I needed a socket set to get into here so you just loosen these screws the bolts actually push this all back and then it will pop and while in that it has to be paid attention to but from here we can see some ridiculous capacitors in there whoa and the locking stuff so the first thing here is the spindle lock so this will not turn right now because this was engaged and now the platters actually turn we can see the belt here is a fabric belt thankfully so that won't go bad but now we need to unlock the heads so let's take a look at that okay so like I said earlier I definitely don't feel I correctly locked the heads and it's really difficult to tell what's going on in here so let me cut off because that's what I put in there and now all we can kind of start to get an idea of what's going on so this is the lock you're supposed to pull this over and put it on this pig here at least that's us that's what it seems like but when I try to get this piece all the way over the plastic bends like I was mentioning it doesn't actually continue to move so I was concerned if I put it on there this would snap in transport so to open this or unlock the heads push it over here drop it down and push it on there we go now the heads should be free so there we go that was how I transported the drive I'm not an expert that could be wrong but as far as I know that was correct I guess would help to know what model number drive this is this is a 6103 if you have to transport one of these yourself now it turned out the bit to take off the bottom screws exactly the same to take off the top so we can see what's going on in here and oh man this is really awesome so this should actually be held in there and actually held in there it's well alarming those have moved around but you know who knows when this was last opened other than 1982 I guess is when this drive was made and it tested with no bad cylinders that's pretty sweet but right now I'll be heads or over the disks so I'm really curious unfortunately half with that panel back on on the bottom I'm going to try and take that off and then move that lever again to see if the heads move because they're there right there they're very clearly on the disk my tripods at its maximum height but let me try and move the camera over so you can see that a little better I guess you could go with a little bit of a cleaning in there as well oh yeah that's very very pretty okay I'm gonna leave the camera rolling and I'm gonna take off that bottom panel and move the latch and see what happens alright here we go grabbed and moved that is do squat well that sucks huh that's really upsetting okay so this this went on a hundred mile road trip with the heads over the drive platters that's great well rotating it I don't see any damage in the area that they are over so maybe everything survived fine I don't know all right this is incredibly difficult to fit me and the camera in here but if I move that bar you can see the bottom there is a piece of plastic I'm moving the retention bar underneath and that's moving with it now I'm not sure what this does but when I move it all the way over it goes underneath the label there where you can't see it but it bumps up against something and if I pull the label down like I'm gonna lock it over that part it doesn't continue to move so that gets stuck on the top side now I've also noticed that I can terrifyingly but possibly move the stepper that controls the heads now I don't want to move that a lot like move it out of the way cuz I don't intend on moving as her drive again but maybe if it was all the way back here as if the heads had been parked and the last time and this was turned on maybe then the retention mechanism down here would have worked so I'm guessing it's because the heads were not fully retracted was the reason that my head thing can't be locked in place so yeah I'm gonna have to that's really difficult do this blind I'll do that when I'm underneath but maybe that's what would be required to get the heads to properly be locked in place you'd pull it all the way out away from the disks then do it okay moving away from the fixed disc drive now it turns out I didn't fully lock in this removable cartridge drive let's go ahead and pull this one out alright I remove the dust cover down in here we can see the heads importantly we can see there are two heads here but there's also a second set down there that you can just barely see and that's how we know there is another platter under here oh gosh I can't touch it okay huh wow that is shockingly open okay good you know I didn't touch a surface just the edge for reference so okay now let's go ahead and go through the full cartridge loading this procedure so here you can see the disk inside the cartridge you align it so that the whole faces the heads push it down in lock it in place and then wheel it back in and the alignment on this isn't tremendous it's rubbing on here but that's how you would load in a cartridge and unloading is obviously the opposite to pull the latch and it releases now I think this may be magnetic and we can see there are magnets on the bottom of this when you put the dust cover on it just snaps on and it gets held in place with the magnets and you can actually push this out and pull this up and then it doesn't release the magnets so you can carry it and there is supposed to be a dust cover that goes over the platter when you have that in there so we'll be leaving that in there and with that I'd say we're pretty much done now the obvious question is getting this stuff working so here's the thing these are really I don't want to say they were super complicated but there's a lot going on in here like you saw there are a ton of giant circuit boards in this thing there are a ton of not super giant but still pretty big circuit boards in that and that's got a lot of dat dedicated data general chips in it and I don't know if those are all gonna work hopefully but this isn't just your average computer to flip the switch and see what happens even the power supplies are going to be tricky because those monstrously big serves I should have gone Sean - the one under here because that is their sole big man so I'm gonna have to really go slow take my time my plan is I think first I'm gonna try and get the - or terminal working because that'll be a fun thing to have on video that really encapsulate this it's going to be the most relatable thing for people then I can start working on these one at a time so I'd say my first plan of attack here is going to be to get the Micra Nova CPU board working so all I will have to do to pull that out really is actually just unplug that and then wiggle this back and forth and turn it a couple of times now there we go so getting just for example this one board to boot is the kind of goal I'm looking at here for starting out all of this down to just this one board so to get this board working I'm going to have to go through and look at the power supply that's where the real work is on most of these things because these likely aren't going to have any issues but the power supplies I mean you're got to all be familiar with bad capacitors by now imagine capacitors from the 70s yeah so I really have to go through make sure there's nothing that's catastrophic ly bad in these and I just got to take my time so it's going to be a very long time before we see any of the real interesting parts of this outside the terminal come to life and I'm I will be doing videos about the whole process this isn't going to be one I got it working video it's probably going to be a large series of videos focusing on each individual part like say the whole hard drive by itself or just the CPU card in the Nova 4x or getting the floppy disk drives working in the Micro Nova it's going to be better to compartmentalize each individual project like that because that's how I'm going to attempt to get these working so I hope you guys found this interesting this is a very different computer purchase for a private collector I think I am up to the challenge and I'm really looking forward to it if you want to support the channel I am on patreon but for now that's it there will be plenty of videos coming out about this later I'll see you next time you

Channel: Tech Tangents

Views: 128,849

Rating: 4.903255 out of 5

Keywords: Tech Tangents, AkBKukU, main, 1970s, Data General, Nova, 4/X, Nova 4, microNova, transport, moving, computer, minicomputer

Id: mBssIIRGkOw

Length: 49min 46sec (2986 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 17 2020

Reddit Comments

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[u/johnkiniston]

Super cool, I love his channel.