so i was digging through an old warehouse at work the other day and alone on a parts shelf i found an old computer. At least i think its a computer. its about the size of a normal desktop (not a M/T) with a bunch of ports on the back. thing is, none of them are modern at all, no ps-2, ethernet, or phone; everything is serial paralell and i think a scsi or 2, all the old pins with two thumb-screws on the sides. i haven't had much chance to look at it yet, i think i'm gonna bring ti home just to see if it even powers up at all. the only model number i can find on the back is 3200 and its made by motorola. The darn thing prolly weighs near 50lb.
if anyone knows anything about this or what it maybe could be please feel free to enlighten me. when i get it home i'll take some pictures inside and out.
This maybe?
A mention of a Moto 3200 computer involved with spectral anaysis.
I've got an old NZ made router with a Motorola 683200 CPU, I believe. Could it be a piece of networking gear?
jon- i looked at that link, it would be very cool if that is what it is, but theres no way that it weight 225lb
parrot-o don't think that its network related, possible i suppose, but it seems to have the wrong ports on the back, next time i get a chance i'll get a closer look at the ports.
i have pics of this thing, and i also have it in my posession. still have no clue what it is though.
it does power up and i hear the drives making noise. i have no method for control or display though
if anyone wants this thing they are welcome to come and get it. zip is 12822.
as soon as i can get some more information i will be putting it in the classifieds.
Actually, looking closer at the rear shots, the larger board is labeled "MVME715P" so it's gotta be a Motorola VME bus system. It looks like the 3200 is a small desktop VME bus system. The real info on the computer itself is the labels on the back of the VME cards.
Where it says "Serial port 1" and "Console" just plug in a serial cable with a null modem adapter and use a regular term program. I'd guess it's set at 8N1 9600, but I could be wrong. I'd love to play with this thing, but it's a tad far, I think.
The guys at NetBSD might be interested in it to port on to or something. There's surely omebody who'd be interested in this.
The MVME712A/AM card is the serial/parallel/SCSI/ethernet card. I can't really read the middle card's number, but it looks like 2058.
This thing looks like fun, that's for sure.
the 3 cards on the back are (in order top to bottom)
1. MVME715p
2. MVME705b
3. MVME712A/AM
and the 3 on the inside (under the drives, also top to bottom)
1. MVME335
2. MVME333-2
3. MVME147SRF
the drives are
3.44 floppy
unknown maybe some type of tape drive
and a hard drive of unknown size
i don't really have any experience working with modems or serial ports. the first computer that i remember was my parents apple II/gs and i was just a kid for that. so when you're talking about null modem and term program its all just greek to me. maybe i will learn it eventually, but right now i just don't have the time, and i need to scale down my computer collection as it is.
A null modem adapter swaps a couple lines in a serial port to make two computer serial ports able to talk to each other, instead of a computer to a modem. This lets one computer pretend to be a text based "terminal" like older computers used to use instead of a dedicated monitor and keyboard. Term programs are short for terminal programs, which emulate the capabilities of a dedicated terminal on a regualr computer. Basically it's cheap and standard way to get text in and out of a computer with out having to design in a whole video card and keyboard setup. If you've used the Terminal program in OS X, that's similar to the kind of interface you'd get with a term program running with a cable betweent the 3200 and a regular computer. The VME computer you have is seriously geeky. It may not be totally fast or modern, but in geek points it scores fairly high.
The original link I found with just the model number seems to be a board that is designed to give a computer similar to your a PowerPC upgrade.
How much do you think that thing weighs? I shipped ~30Lbs or so to PA recently, and it only cost $20. It couldn't have beeen much larger than your VME machine, but it might have been lighter.
well a quick toss (er..set) on the bathroom scale shows 37lb.
cool to hear that it has a high "geek factor" now if i only had someone near me to teach me about this thing then it might be worth keeping.
i was looking on ebay and saw that some boards with similar serial numbers were fetching near $200 is this thing really worth that much or are those extremelly overinflated numbers. any clue how much this is worth? if it is worth anything at all??
They're over inflated unless you happen to run a specialized piece of industrial equipment based on one of those. Under certain circumstances, it's worth (somewhat) big money to not have to replace a $25,000 setup, but to just spend the cost of the inflated $200 eBay prices to replace the failed part. The common thing we tell people around here is the worth of an old computer is whatever the market will bear. ie, You might list it on eBay for $100 and get no bids, but if you list it on eBay for $6000 and it sells, then so be it. Otherwise it's got a scrap value of a few dollars. To really check the prices, look at completed listing, and not current listings. How many of those expensive boards are actually being sold?
This, I had to Google...
Came across a site that had a little information on the Motorola VME systems. Looks like this one is a similar to a Model 8220...
Motorola Delta Series 8000
Peace,
Rob
found out more info about most of the boards
http://www.innovative-research.com/vmeboards.html
i agree that most of the inflated boards are not selling,
is there some way to look at completed listings that i don't know?? b/c i haven't found a way to do that
Under the search bar is a link for "Advanced Search", and from there you can put in a search and check a box for "Completed Listings Only".
ha ha wow i feel dumb, guess i just never noticed that before
thanks
Be wary of many of those listings. I've just seen several that cut-n-paste crap they find that happens to have the model number of the board they are selling in it, but has no relation to just the board itself. One auction for the MVME147SRF claimed it included serial, parallel, SCSI, etc on just the CPU board. The picture, of course, shows nothing of those features on the board. I'd guess they just pasted a bunch of specs for some computer that happened to have that board in it and are trying to make a quick buck. eBay at it's finest.