A couple of my viewers linked me here and yep, this is awesome. Great-looking machine, can't go wrong with blue and woodgrain. Thanks for sharing the experience!
Whoa, excuse me while I fangirl out for a minute, haha. Thank you so much for checking the video out! I'm super excited to get this thing up and going again, especially the printer. From what people have been telling me, that thing should be quite the event to watch in action!
@@UsagiElectric If Clint is here, I'm in the right place. lol I still have an SMD hard drive sat on a shelf here, which was bought as part of trying to recover the files from the HDD of a Quantel Paintbox. (the NEC drive was new-old stock, for only around £40 on Feebay. The Paintbox itself uses a Fujitsu M2294, and holds around 330MB.) I love the look of the old minicomputers.
@Usagi Electric thank you for bringing golden times memories back! I started my professional life working with those "minis" ,,😄 Looking at your Centurion, I remembered the nights I have spent troubleshooting DECs... 😐 I think I have a guess for you. The caramel box besides your modem is probably a "terminal concentrator" or whatever Centurion has called it at the time. Basically it permits the user to connect terminals and some times printers remotely. It uses the phone lines and modems like the one there to do so. Regarding de terminals, I don't see the connection very well but they were usually RS-232. The interface and the terminal have to match in configuration. Speed and mode (full or half duplex) mismatched and nothing will work. Try to build a loopback connector to test the terminals. Good luck with your Centurion!!! 😄
The drive on the left is a CDC Hawk - Model 9427. When you fire it up, be sure you have vacuumed it out thoroughly, replace the hepa and prefilters, and pull the voice coil cable, and do a spin purge (cartridge loaded - but not the heads) for a day or two.
In 2003 I worked for a company as a part-time IT help desk and a part-time computer operator. The computer operator portion was basically baby-sitting an IBM AS/400 and the attached printer, which was similar to that one you got, but bigger. I would feed it a box of paper every morning and make sure the massive print job was successful.
My first job was programming the Centurion. 1977ish. Within a year , I was manager of programming and instsllations. Will be more than happy to enlighten you on it's place in that era. And what you have. I also have 2 oh tge sales brocures. And may have a CPL programming manual
Hi Jeff, I'm not sure if anyone's been in contact with you, the team working on this would love to connect. Most of the discussion is on discord (link in the episode description), where there's a handful of ex centurion employees (I am not one) contributing. If you do still have it, a CPL programming manual would be incredible.
Well, watching this video brought back memories from the the late seventies. That second disk drive looked very similar to the CDC 9427H drives I used to work on as a field service engineer. The Micom box is a serial multiplexer -- it takes all those serial port connections and time multiplex's the signals to go out as one serial port stream to a modem. We used 2400 and later 9600 baud modems over a dedicated line, no dial up required, which allowed the main computer to be used in more than one store. Got to admit that printer looked pretty funky. I worked on drum and band printers, besides good old dot-matrix and daisy-wheel printers;the best description I can think of for that thing is a chain printer.
@@timothy098-b4f, I remember the 9427H as having a total capacity of 5 MB -- 2.5 MB on the fixed platter and another 2.5 MB on the disk cartridge. Normally, at least for my company, the data was mirrored between the two.
Thank you! Your SWTPC and Shelby's Data General helped get me interested in these old minicomputers, and I happen to have a garage big enough at the moment to hold one, so I figured there was no better time than right now to snatch this one up!
I worked at an auto parts store in the early 1980s, and the back office & point-of-sale system was based on a system similar to this, and had the same blue & beige terminals.
According to the DIP switch legend on the back of the terminal you powered up, self-echo was set to off. You might get text on the CRT if you turn it to on. At least the disc pack has the Control Data logo on it, so you may be able find service data for the drive on-line, but for the minicomputer itself?
That was absolutely it! I ran back out to the garage and gave it a test: i.postimg.cc/tJhfRy07/IMAG3685.jpg I actually have the little user's manual that came with the drive itself, which is super cool. But, you're right, finding any information on the rest of the machine has been difficult for sure!
@@UsagiElectric that will give you doubled characters when you hook it up, no doubt. You can try th eterminal with a linux machine to check it out properly.
I think the smaller 'modem' is a leased-line modem. Those ran at fast rates for the time, upwards of 4800bps. The other box, the Micro 8000 looks to me not to be a modem but rather a concentrator/hub for a whole bunch of terminals to connect to it and then to the computer. I once owned a Data General MV4000DC that had a similar device.
I think you're right on the money about the Micro 8000, as that also explains why I got multiple terminals with the machine. It would make sense that the company using the machine would setup multiple workstations and then have them all multiplexed in through the Micro 8000. I just looked up the Data General MV4000DC and that's a super cool looking machine! Looks much more compact than Centurion I have here, though if the Centurion used standard floppy disks, it'd be about the same size. Those CDC drives are massive!
In 1987 I started work for data cabling company Unisys at the age of 18. We used to wire these kinds of systems together, soldering 25 pin or 37 D connectors on each end. I still do the same kind of work and now and again see some of the old cables in the roof spaces, from back when I installed them in the 80's.
I shed a tear at the kind of space available to you. You are so lucky! I love this sort of vintage tech as well, but I'm stuck in an apartment. What you have available to you is something that should be appreciated! I grew up on a farm, so I remember what that kind of space was like. Most of my collection is limited to a couple 80s era computers and 60s to 70s era calculators. Far too much is packed away in a storage unit. Wish i could spread all of it out. In the meanwhile, I will have to live vicariously through your space and your collection though, so have a sub! This channel looks awesome, and I can't wait to see what other retro stuff you've collected, and will collect in the future!
In the early 90's I got paid to haul a mainframe to the scrap yard, it broke my heart. I lived in a tiny mobile home trailer at the time or I would have gave it a new home.
A few suggestions: 1. Those two fan motors are for the absolute filters. The replaceable drive should be in that cabinet as well. Those old drives were very touchy when came to dust and other airborne stuff, you don't keep them clean-you have head crashes and replacement heads will be hard to come by. 2. Those are most likely ASCII terminals. (I agree, I think that one box is a concentrator for the other terminals) The serial setup can be problematic, in the old days you had to select baud rate, # of stop bits, parity (odd, even or none) and leased line modems you also had fuss time delays for high and low tones, echo suppression and other stuff I don't remember, you cannot believe how complex serial communication used to be. I think each of these db-25 plugs on the back of those each could drive a ASCII terminal. 3. If you run that printer much, you will want to replace the foam, that was for sound deadening. The chain printer weren't as noisey as drum printers, but they aren't known for silence. Good luck with your project.
I have done this operation so many times. Once with my AS/400 mainframe, 11 cabinets and 30+ terminals. I loved the late 90s and the scrap out. I'm a new fan.
Takes me back to my Vaz 11/730 days. Before pulling out the drives, check the bottom front of the rack, there may be a pull out foot to stop the rack falling forward.
Wow, when I ran across this video and saw that cabinet on that computer with all the blue and wood like trim, it brought back some real memories I have not thought about in decades. When I was a young man in the mid 1970's I worked for a Motorola Two Way Radio Shop in West Texas. They became a sales rep. for a company I think was named Warex Computers in Dallas. Apparently, they handled the Centurion Minicomputers just like the one you have. We had one of these computers in our office and they put all their records in it. I will always remember the shop manager telling me to be sure and not stick my hand down inside those big hard drives with my wristwatch on. Of course, they were wind up then. It would magnetize it! I remember when they celebrated the sale of their first one in our area then. I believe it was on the order of $50K. For a small business that was a pretty good amount of money in those day. I had the opportunity to visit the Warex facility in Dallas and see what they did to checkout a system. I thought it all was just amazing and very exciting at the time. I certainly am no expert on these machines, but in the late 70's I cut my teeth on the Southwest Technical Products 6800 computer. It kicked off a great education and my future career in embedded controller design for automation. Thank you for a great video. I am glad I found your channel.
Sounds like you worked with Woody at Industrial Communication in Odessa, TX. I got to work one afternoon with one of Industrial Communication radio repair tech's on a radio (trunk mount car phone) that would not "key off" when the PTT was released. Problem was and open RF bypass capacitor on a cathode resistor. Even sleep a few nights in a travel trailer in the parking lot at Industrial Communication during the "Permian Basin Oil & Gas Show". FYI - We likely met when you visited the Warrex - Centurion office in Richardson, TX. Remember one of our largest & early customers was H. L. Brown Oil & Gas in Midland, TX . The founder of Warrex, John Warren was killed in a car accident on his way to H. L. Brown in 1976.
@@kenromaine2387 I worked in the radio shop and reported to Woody. I took care of the mobile telephone system they had then. I think it was made by Secode. I also assisted Albert with the answering service and all of his telephone wires everywhere😊. It was a really good experience for me then. I was there I believe from about 1975 into 1977. I was going to be working on the Warrex computer, however they decided I was better at working on the radios at the time.
Nice Austin Healey. Having restored a couple of Jensen Healey's, it makes perfect sense that you'd dive into a project like this if you can deal with Lucas wiring/components and not lose your mind. Just finished part 6 of the series and looking forward to more!
Thank you! It's actually been in the family longer than I have, haha. But I'm right there with you, if someone can handle the Prince of Darkness' electronics, all other electronics seem a little simpler by comparison. The Jensen Healey is a really cool car and I would love to drive one someday, Donald Healey had a particular flair that just made cars a little special!
That Micom device is a serial mux. Basically takes all those serial ports and converts it to one port which can be sent to another matching device over probably a 9600 baud (or less) serial connection. ADP used to install tons of those into car dealerships...
That makes a lot more sense! And also helps explain why I got three data terminals in the deal as well. The company probably had the three terminals setup as work stations all hooked into the same machine. It's going to be a lot of fun trying to bring it all back to life!
Worked with one of these computers in the late 1980's. I am amazed that you were able find one. We had the computer, several terminals, a line printer (like the big one you have there), a couple of dot matrix printers and a 10meg Winchester drive that sat on top of the whole unit. When this thing was powered up, you could heat a small house! And the line printer would make you deaf. The early days of computing :) Thanks for sharing.
We bought a IBM PC with a 10 megabyte hard drive in 1984. We also bought a printer from the IBM salesman. Big desktop thing with tractor drives and serial ports. Then we had to buy an adapter to get the IBM printer to work with the IBM computer. Even the salesman was mystified by that one.
Man this is exciting, you're channel is like a glorious mash up of CuriousMarc, Ben Eater and Mr Carlson's Lab, the best! I do hope you get to tackle that old modem as part of this series. To give it something to talk to on the cheap you can knock up a little telephone network out of a RaspberryPi running Asterisk, a VOIP ATA adapter and maybe a pulse-to-tone converter. I love old modems, their linking of systems over the phone network was so brilliant back in the day. Best of luck with this restoration!
Thank you so much! Interestingly, CuriousMarc and Ben Eater have been massive inspirations in getting the channel up and going. I've talked with CuriousMarc a few times, and he's just been an absolute legend! You know, I've always wanted to get a Raspberry Pi, but never really found a good enough excuse to get one, but now I have that excuse! Time to start learning Linux! It'll be super interesting seeing how to get the old modem and everything linked together and talking with each other. This is all really new territory for me, so I'm really excited to learn about it!
The disk drive that loads from the top is a 9427H also know as a Hawk drive from CDC / MPI. The removable platter is 5 Meg and the fixed plater is also 5 Meg in size. The other drive is a 9448 CMD or cartridge module drive also known as a Phoenix with a 16 Meg removable cartridge. The fixed Platters varied depending on the number of heads installed, and could be 32, 64, or 96 meg. I would expect one if not two of those cards in the cage are disk controllers responsible for interfacing to those drives.
I’m sure someone will have pointed this out already, but the computer has the same color scheme as the car behind it. I’ve watched many videos in this series before coming across this one, so I had always thought that wasn’t an accident. Awesome computer!! Can’t wait to see it fully functional with the printer.
Simply admire any guy that buys an anchient comuter to match hisAustin Healey! I grew up by the Austin works, leaving school in 79'. Restored a 3'0 litre in same colour combination as yours in the 90's at Charterhouse Garage in B'ham city centre! Good luck with all your projects bud...Lee
That makes a whole lot more sense, thank you for the information! This is all a bit beyond me at the moment, but I'm excited to start learning more about it!
wow, this channel was a surprise. My father worked at the Swedish Solar Telescope wich relocated from Italy to the Canary Island of La Palma in 1979, they used to have a big PDP 11/34 down in the basement and the most massive printer I´ve ever seen. Eventually they upgraded (?) to a Sinclair ZX Spectrum that run the software for the tracking engines that makes it possible for the telescope to follow the sun. When they changed the mirrors sometimes around the mid- to late 1980s they got into these very modern micros reminiscent to what we use today. (I guess you just can´t have one of the world´s best solar telescope being controlled to what is basically a toy.) In the early 1990s the telescopes of the Isaac Newton Group still had racks with these huge reel- to reel data tapes.
I think I definitely will send Marc an e-mail once I get further stuck into working on them. I'm sure there's a lot of similarities with the Xerox system he restored a while back! Plus, Marc is just a generally awesome guy, so any excuse to talk to him is a good one in my book, haha.
0:53 Minicomputers were cheaper and lower-spec in many ways. Mainframes had elaborate I/O controllers to handle high throughput without burdening the CPU. This made them great for batch operations (like a lot of business data processing -- payroll, cheque reconciliations and the like). But then this new thing called “interactive” computing came on the scene, but it was not an efficient way to use an expensive mainframe. Minis, on the other hand, were ideal.
Another interesting thing I've been discovering about Minicomputers is that they were primarily just for storing a large amount of data! Centurion did write their own proprietary software (word processor, spreadsheets, etc.), but their primary market was the ability for multiple users to create data and store it on the disk packs. The Hawk drive, which was the drive that was initially in the computer when it was built in 1979/1980, had I believe 10MB removable platters, which was massive compared to the standard floppies of the day. The Phoenix drive that was in the second chassis offered something like 40MB of data on the removeable platters which is an insane amount of data!
@@UsagiElectric How did they back up that data? Hard drives were and are unreliable, and removable drives are even more vulnerable to trouble. It was common to do backups to tape, but your system didn’t seem to have any tape drive.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 I can't speak for this system but the systems I worked on of this vintage were backed up to tape like yousaid but at the mainframe end. So, Bendix Flight, Bendix Aviation, and Bendix Guidance were all in an enormous building in Teterboro, New Jersey, but all of the actual processing was done in their headquarters in Southfield, Michigan. This system would have been RJE, Remote Job Entry where the data was uploaded every night to a mainframe somewhere, or a batch system where the data was sent to a mainframe and processed over night and sent back the next day.
I started on a Prime “Mini” computer in 1978. I programmed in Fortran and machine code on Punch cards then shortly a VDT. Always has a place in my heart.
That's awesome that you got to actually work with a Mini back in the day! From the extremely limited documentation I've found so far, it seems like Centurion sold a Fortran interpreter with their Minicomputers too. Fortran was the go-to programming language for a long time it appears!
I had a chance to take an entire IBM 370 system. Drives, cpu, printers, software, the whole working system. It going to the scrap heap. I couldn’t do it, no place to store it. Broke my heart.
Epic, reminds me of the time i got a 60s PA system from a factory. It filled an entire van and weight a ton, had 4 philips tube amps, pre-amp,tuner, 2 turntables, 2 reel recorders and a microphone all built into one giant custom steel cabinet. i now also found a partial ibm system from the 60s.
Decades ago I worked for a Dutch company called Compair. They bought old MAI mini computers, cleaned, spray painted them and put a nice new plastic Compair decal on. I was just the delivery driver. Those things were insanely heavy.
I used to work on the first type of drive. You have to run them with the heads locked to "purge" the dust off the platters.... for 12hrs once the filters were changed. .Very very heavy.
Whoa, that's awesome that you used to work with them! That's a good tip about running them to purge the dust off. They're a really interesting bit of history and kind of wild to see in person, and they are indeed very, very heavy, haha.
Beautiful wood and powder-blue. Priceless "floppy drives" :) I immediately recognized the DRAM chip family (I built a 64 KiB board with a close relative - I still need to restore that computer). The MCM 41168 is a 16Kx1 DRAM. It looks like a 9x8 arrangement, so probably actually 8x8 which means 128 KiB on this board. I'm curious about the CPU driving it. Everything suggests Z-80 with banked memory, but I hope we find something more interesting. (But do open, clean, and inspect before powering on more stuff please).
Thank you! And I'm really digging the color scheme, more computers need pastel colors and genuine wood accents! I couldn't figure out the right terminology for those drives. They're not quite hard disks, though the platters are just like hard disks, but they're not quite floppy disks, though they do have removable cartridges like a floppy. I'm sure they have a proper name, but it sure wasn't coming to me, haha. That's awesome that you build a DRAM board like that, I can't imagine the diligence required to get it all wired up correctly! As for the CPU, you'll be pleased to know it is a bit more interesting than a Z80: i.postimg.cc/63KLkQF6/IMAG3642.jpg At a quick glance, it looks like there are two AMD AM2901 4-bit bit-slice ALUs and two AMD 2909 4-bit bit-slice address sequencers, and then a colossal amount of 7400 series logic ICs. As we get further in the build, each board is going to get a close inspection just to get a rough idea of how it works and replace any bad caps that look to be hanging about. I actually wasn't going to power anything on, but I figured I had a spare terminal if one blew up, so I just went for it!
I'm so glad this video was recommended to me! This is quite fascinating, I barely recall these types of computer systems. They were just phasing out, as I really became interested in them (early 80's), but I am extremely fascinated with this vintage technology! Thanks for documenting this process, I'm "in" for sure!
the printer is a Band Printer most likely a Data Product Line Printer it may have been a 300 LPM/600LPM Printer, the Disk drives most likely were Control Data Winchester drive you had a removable drive on top and a sealed Winchester drive below. I worked for DEC on PDP11 systems and DEC VAX systems back in 1978-85. I worked on RP06/7 Disk drives, RK05/6/7 Disk Drive, LP05/06 Line printers. PDP11/34A, 40, 50 , 60, 70, VAX 11/780, 11/750.
I think the printer might actually be a little slower than that at just 150 LPM. I found an ad for a Centurion system in a magazine from 1983 and that was what they listed for the printer, but the only way to know for sure will be to power this bad boy and let it churn through some paper! The drives are actually CDC made drives, the older one is a Hawk drive and the newer one is a Phoenix drive. I go through them in a bit more detail in the next part of the series, but in Part 8 we actually take a look at the platters and it's not great news. They're on the back burner for the time being. That's awesome that you worked for DEC! I have a buddy with a PDP11 and I'm sure he'd love to pick your brain!
@@UsagiElectric I'm pretty sure that Hawk drives are SMD drives (or CMD?), if you really really wanted to you may possibly be able to grab a modern solid state SMD replacement (obviously would allow you to play with images so much more easily as I think you can attach to these drives via a modern PC as well. It's not hard to find ppl who know a lot more about this, put a feeler out on cctalk/cctech!)
That's so true! It really blew my mind when someone actually explained that a 600V audio amplifier is technically considered low voltage. Mind you, it'll still knock you across the room if you put your finger in the wrong spot, haha.
@@UsagiElectric Unfortunately most people think "low voltage" means it's safe. Tell them that mains is low voltage, then get into Safety Extra Low Voltage and Functional Extra Low Voltage and heads asplode.
@@ian_b My tube computer is being built entirely in SELV, which is mental for tubes to be operating that low, but in the scale of voltages, pretty much all tube operated stuff classifies as low voltage anyways, haha.
Oh man! I CANNOT WAIT for this series to unfold! SO FASCINATING! This may inspire me to pull my old NEC Astra 220 Mini out of storage and finally try to do something with it. As it stands now, I wouldn’t even know how to begin...
Thank you! I'm super excited about digging in to this one too! I googled NEC Astra 220 mini and couldn't even find pictures of one, so it sounds like you've got your hands on a rare machine! You should definitely bust it out and get it up and running (and take lots of pics to show me, haha).
Centurion computer, great project :) The printer is a Band printer, was in common use before dot-matrix printer, don't be surprised, the printer might write very fast, we had one that wrote 10+ pages pr. minute. The terminal is properly simple VT100 terminal or something like that. RS232 or current loop. The CPU board is properly made of 74-series chips and an a (EP)ROM for instruction decoding.
Thank you! And 10+ pages per minute is insane! I mean, I had an inkjet printer just out of college that couldn't go that fast (granted, it was a pretty trashy printer, haha). Now, I'm even more excited to get that printer up and going. Even if it just types out the test print page, it'll be exciting to see it in action! The CPU board looks to be like two AMD AM2901 4-bit bit-slice ALUs and two AMD 2909 4-bit bit-slice address sequencers, and then a colossal amount of 7400 series logic ICs. It's super cool and I can't wait to dive into it in more detail: i.postimg.cc/63KLkQF6/IMAG3642.jpg
@@stevenscherbinski1512 The foam was falling out on it's own in most places, so it needed to come out so as not to damage anything. I may go back and line the inside with sound deadening material like Dynamat or something. It'll probably add another 30 pounds to the machine, but may keep it from making my ears bleed. I'm super excited to see this thing run though!
Used to work at a hotel that had a minicomputer in the back office to run the property management system. When you put the disk into the drive, you'd flip the case over and put it on top to store it
Just watched through the series so far. Excellent series of videos! You deserve to be way more famous in the vintage computer space of RUclips than you are! I'm doing my part by liking and commenting on all of your videos! Cheers!
This looks pretty cool. You are really lucky that black foam just dried out and crumbled to dust. I work on vintage analog synthesizers and many of them had black foam inside to dust proof the slide potentiometer controls on them and it actually reverts to liquid form with age and turns into a black, super sticky tar that is a real pain to remove without damaging paintwork or the pots themselves.
My dad worked in sales in the tape and disk division of Control Data for years in the 70s and 80s. Seeing the CDC logo brought back a flood of memories.
Oh man. My Dad bought a Wang 2200 minicomputer for his business back in 1978. He ran that thing for a good 10+ years until ‘88 or ‘89. They were so expensive that you simply did not replace them for that long. You just upgraded them a bit at a time and kept going. Wish I could find one of those in good condition. Really looking forward to watching your other videos about this awesome relic.
@@UsagiElectric I wonder if you could somehow use one of the termilnals on the valve computer. Although I would'nt even know where to begin with that. :) Just an idle thought.
@@frankowalker4662 Actually, I think that might be something that's totally doable! The terminals are just a 20mA current loop, so they're expecting serial data at a specific baud rate, and that's about it. That may be something worth trying in the future!
From what I read about Centurion when I paused the vid, it appears they did turnkey business solutions and the hardware they used, at least the disk drives, are Control Data Corporation products. The line printer looks like something I used way back when I first started in the industry, only the brand was Data 100 and the color scheme was mustard and black. The external appearance other than color was exactly the same. It had that same black foam sound deadening material inside the lid, and appeared to be the same mechanically inside. I remember ours used to get paper jams regularly. One thing you don't have, though, is tape drives. The mux and modem would have been for communication on a leased data line to some other location. Data 100 was acquired by Northern Telecom but retained the branding and color scheme. For some reason my company used this setup to act as a remote site to our IBM mainframes located in Houston (and occasionally to some other places) rather than use IBM equipment to do that job. I recall that we had some emulator programs to allow our system to run like various other company's hardware to access reports and do other work, but mostly we emulated an IBM RJE station to submit and output batch jobs to and from our Big Blue systems.
At least as a chain printer it wasn't likely to have the kind of paper jam complications that the early drum printers could have. The "Printer On Fire" error code in many UNIX versions didn't start out as a joke.
@@evensgrey We had a Data 100 drum printer before the chain printer was added as a supplement. The drum printer - at least the one we had - was fine, very few problems. The chain printer was a never ending problem source, and slow to boot. Later we got rid of it and added a newer model printer which was Data 100's clone of the IBM 1403, IIRC. For all I know IBM built it for them in their colors. Or perhaps Data 100 licensed the design from IBM.
That Micom unit is basically a digital "PABX" for switching serial RS-232 connections. I installed and managed a Micom 600 system which occupied three 6 foot racks and had several hundred of those cards. It was the digital switching unit for all the terminals and computer systems in the university where I worked back in the late 1980s. I still have a couple of the cards and the operating/configuration manual as souvenirs from that system after it was de-commissioned around 1993. You probably won't have any use for the Micom unless you plan to connect many terminals to your computer.
Well darn. Hellorld! [foreshadowing] This was the first video I saw on the channel. It's been quiet a ride! You have something unique and interesting here, and I don't just mean the Centurion but the channel itself and all your other projects. Perhaps it seems slow but the channel is growing, and I feel it is on the verge of blowing up. Quality will not be denied. I hope you never feel discouraged because you have something great here!
The first business computer I used was a Data General they installed in an auto parts store I worked at. At the end of each night I had to swap out one of those removable disk platters which sort of backed up the day's data. All these components look very similar so I'd say this puts the system squarely in the early 1980s era. Completely underwhelming as an actual computer but at the time, it was a great way to manage a business that was previously done manually with general ledgers and a huge card desk for tracking inventory.
My grandfather ran a small business, and from the mid-1970s through to 1990, brought home a removable CDC disc pack every weekend. (The bookkeeper brought one home on the other days.) It was significantly more primitive than the Centurion, but having core memory and being single user meant that you could punch in the hex address of the point where it failed after a power outage.)
I wouldn't be jacking media in and out of the drives until you get some instructions. The relationship of the heads and media was precise and delicate. There was one way to install or remove media and 99 thousand ways to do it wrong. With the power off I'm particularly concerned. Maybe someone who knows exactly can chime in -
Thank you for the heads up! I was looking at the drive and it looked like the read heads are swung out of the way, so I figured just setting the media in place would be alright as long as I didn't put any power into it (I also chose a disk that didn't seem to have any important notes on it in case it became a sacrificial disk). Though, to be honest, I'm more worried about the fact that it's been moved around a lot presumably without having been locked down into place. At any rate, both drives are going to come out of the chassis for a cleaning, inspection and alignment, hopefully to avoid a head crash in the future!
takes me back to college and my first job. At work we had a MUCH larger set of mini computers, a vax cluster, and a MODCOMP classic II. 4 racks, 6 feet high. washing machine sized 60 MB removable hard disks, and a big brother to your chain printer that could go so fast the green bar paper would shoot in a loop 4 feet high pout the top as it printed. The one in the college was even larger. A DEC System20. its lots of fun to get these old machines running again. If you have old 4kx1 static rams on the memory cards they are likely to have lots of issues. 16k drams are similarly unreliable - very susceptible to radiation damage from the tiny amount of c-13 in the plastic cases on the chips. NOS ceramic case military/aerospace parts form that era are still functional, but the commercial plastic encapsulated parts are a total crap shoot - less than 25% still work in my experience
Four racks, six feet high is a ridiculously huge computer! I was checking out pictures of that Modcomp Classic II, and man alive it seems all the mini-computers of the 70s had fantastic switches on the front of them! The DEC System 20 is massive! I would love to be able to climb around all these old massive minicomputers one of these days. On this Centurion, it looks like it has a bunch of 2kx1 MCM4116 DRAM chips. Fortunately, all the DRAMs are socketed, so if I have a bad one I won't have to do a bunch of desoldering. Though, I have no idea how reliable the MCM4116 is - I'm hoping they're decent chips and I won't have to end up replacing most of them.
@@UsagiElectric they are unfortunately still fairly flaky but not as bad as the 16kx1 chips. Old drsms are also super sensitive to power supply start sequence. It's vital that the negative supply come up first, then the 12v then the 5. In that era this was usually "garunteed" by the size of the supply filters. If the capacitors have degraded or failed it can cause catastrophic damage as a result of forward biased parasitic diodes in the chip substrates. Check the power supplies under some load with resistors to ensure they come up correctly before you power up the main cpu, or pull out the ram cards the first time and just look at voltages and ripple. If its like many smaller systems of that vintage it may have highr voltages one the backplane like 8 and 16 which are regulated down to +-5 and 12 with 78/9xx series regulators on the boards, or bigger lm340 types in TO3 packages. Again carefully inspect the electrolytics around any such, even test them if you can. That is a common point of failure even at the time and those capacitors usually don't improve with age.
I love those hard drives from the days that they were interchangeable and loaded/unloaded almost in the manner an optical disc has been for the last 25 years or so. GREAT find, I wish I had room to store and tinker with one of these bad boys. I love how stoked you are.Subbed, I can't wait to see the rest of this. A mincomputer like this was my first ever experience with a computer when my father would take me to the office after work when he was doing stuff, and one day he sat me at the terminal and got me doing data entry - at age 7 - and I was hooked. The guy who'se job I was doing after hours would come in and find a good half-hour or more of his workload was taken care of on some days and it confused the hell out of him, according to Dad until he finally told him. ;-)
As suggested, please don't power up the disk pack drives. They have to be cleaner than an operating theater or you will kill it within seconds. When we used to change the absolute filters on the phoenix drives we ran them for 40 minutes just to purge the filter before we would put the drive online. And that was in a computer room designated as a 'clean room'. The disks have to be spotless too. I doubt anyone could change the heads today and back in the 80's it cost £1,000 back then! By the way, you stow the disk pack cover over the top of the disk pack once it is inserted into the drive. It keeps it clean.
Thank you for the insight! The drives actually were both in pretty rough shape, and both suffered head crashes years before I got my hands on them. I show them in more detail in Part 2 and in Part 8. Here's the full playlist: ruclips.net/p/PLnw98JPyObn0wJFdbcRDP7LMz8Aw2T97V
When you are only looking at these maschines, you get that curious and sentimental feeling like in the final scene of "terminator 2" in the 70's, 80's command-center for the third world war. 👏🏻😀👍🏻🙏🏻
Wow, tried googling the hardware details about this Centurion Mini Computer, but didn’t have much luck. I am totally amazed that you were able to restore this machine.
In 1980, my uncle's engineering firm upgraded their system and I suddenly found myself in possession of a DEC PDP-12, four VT78 units, two reel-to-reel data banks, and a "spacious" 8 megabyte hard drive the size of a laundromat dryer. The total of the lot occupied more than half my parent's garage and generated enough heat to melt lead in that garage.
Oh man, that was an excellent score! The PDP-12 is a gorgeous little machine, and to get the reel-to-reel data banks with it is awesome! I would love to play around with one of those someday!
I had worked on PDP11 systems Plus I had an account using several PDP -8s. I had one account that had an old 20MB drive that was a mechanical detent for the heads vs the Voice coils of the later drives. boy did that make noise when you ran disk seek Diags on it to test the R/W heads.
I don't care about the computer - I just clicked to see your Healey. That was my first car when I was 16, and mine was always more reliable than my friend's Fords and Chevy's and never went to a garage. Anybody who can work on a tube radio can easily fix that Austin product from the same era.
I love the enthusiasm and excitement here, in the fact of all the unknowns; and yet we live in a time when there should stil be people around who used these, to help out :P All the electronics and computing nerds are gawping at the screen right now. thank you :)
Thank you so much! I'm genuinely excited to get this thing up and going! There's a ton of stuff for me to learn too and the community, both here and on other social media platforms, have all banded together and just absolutely knowledge bombed me with fantastic information and resources. That's going to make this restoration actually doable!
Back in the 80s and 90s I had a friend (a sysop for a state Bell Telephone by profession) had a minicomputer (confusingly named an Alpha Micro) in his basement, with three terminals. I was one of several friends that used it for personal word processing. He passed away years ago, no idea what became of his system. It likewise had a Hawk drive, don't remember the model, but it was 5MB (yes, "meg") fixed and 5MB removable. Looked pretty much identical to the one you have. He used an IMSAI front panel for it, and on occasion he actually USED the front panel switches to enter opcodes.
Being born in the 80s, I was aware of this stuff growing up, but I was never really interested in 70s computing until recently. Now that I'm diving into it, there's all sorts of amazing stuff to learn!
I seen somewhere that for the 50th anniversary of the ENIAC they basically showed how technology has changed by taking the giant room size computer and were able to put the same processing power on a chip that was 4 square inches.
And the 50th anniversary of the ENIAC was way back in 1995, nowadays, that same amount of processing power is so small, it roughly the size of the head of a pin!
Thanks. Congratulations! You've achieved the Batcave [circa 1966]. All things considered, I'd probably go with "Captain Thunderbird". Speaking of which - Holy anachronisms, Batman! I never thought I'd actually see blue-bar paper again (outside of an old movie). You're really putting those Amiga people to shame! ;) tavi.
They would have done you a favor if they had left one of those removable disc packs in the drive. When they are in, that big opening is somewhat sealed by the plastic cover. As it is, the retractable heads in the side of the machine are probably dirty as heck and will self-destruct if they try to load. We had some larger 300 MB 'washing machine size' drives and used to replace individual heads. Then there was a whole alignment pack and break out the O-scope to align them. What memories. :)
"A quick clean" is something that you should probably do with every used computer one buys... Was always curious about this computing class myself, so thanks for sharing this series, as now I don't feel the need to run out and get one myself! :)
"Warrex Centurion, an 8-bit minicomputer built by Warrex (later just Centurion), a Texas based company from the late 1970's to the 1980's. The Am2909 and Am2911 microprogram sequencers and the Am2901 ALU were used in the CPU6 variant." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Am2900
Hello, i follow your Project with very Interest, but the first Episode i missed anyway! Thanks for this very cool Project! And i LOVE this Music! Blessing!!! 💝💝💝
I've been watching a few videos on these types of printers and it's insane just how fast they are! I can't wait to see this one fire up and spit out some high-speed prints!
@@UsagiElectric If you want a fast waste paper generator, get a line printer. ruclips.net/video/X6oUGv3M5ec/видео.html I used to service these back in the day. They chew through boxes of listing paper per day. Line printers and chain printers are noisy as hell, so you may want to look at replacing some of that sound deadening foam.
@@AndyHullMcPenguin Dang, that thing can move some paper through it! I'm blown away by these insane printers, I can't believe I never knew about them until now. I mean that line printer can easily outrun a standard modern laser printer! The foam definitely had to come out, but I think I will most likely end up lining it with some sound deadening material in the future. Fortunately, I don't think the computer and printer will ever make it's way inside, so being noisy in the garage is totally alright.
@@UsagiElectric Line printers and other impact printers have some useful characteristics that mean they are still used in some situations. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_printer Impact printers for example produce true copies, in other words if you put a duplicating paper in them, then all of the copies can be shown forensically to have been produced in the same impact operation. This makes forging copies a rather tricky if not impossible task. The Genicom in the previous video is a dot matrix comb printer. They were interesting to work on as they had hundreds of impact needles, hundreds of driver transistors in arrays to drive them and so forth. As a result, they were typically very quick, and somewhat expensive. Repairing them was quite a lucrative aspect of our business back then. If a typical dot matrix printer was several hundred pounds, a line printer might be thousands, or in some cases tens of thousands.
They were called minicomputers because transistor/chip mainframes were the prevailing systems that a (big) business purchased. 1970s-80s. Vacuum tube analog computers were already gone and moved to storage warehouses, by early-mid 70s. Networked PCs began taking over the scene in the late 80s, and took over from minicomputers in the 90s.
In the late 80's I used to go to a local auction house that sold various thing anyone would bring in. A couple of days before the auction, you could come in a look at the items to be auctioned off. I wen't in the one day and there was this IBM mainframe system with 1 printer, 3 terminals, cables, software and manuals. The computer stood about 54" tall, 36" deep and 80" long. the printer was about 48" high, 30" deep and 30" wide. Well, of course, I had to go there tat Sunday night to see what it was going to sell for, with no intentions of buying it. When they got to the IBM, I can't remember what the bidding started at, but the price kept coming down and down. It came all the way down to $5.00 and I raised my hand and it sold for $5.00. I paid a guy $25.00 to load it up on his trailer and take it to my parents house.
Color me all the shades of jealous! That is an absolutely amazing deal for anything old and IBM, even if it was in the late 80's. Do you still have the system, or know where it is? I would love to see more about it, that sounds like a really epic machine!
The "secret" of all these mini-computer companies is that the IBM equivalent was easily three times as much. I worked for two, Sycor, and Data 100 which were merged under the ownership of Northern Telecom. Our customers would at contract's end replace us with the competition and when we went to take out our equipment we would recognize the techs from the other company putting in their stuff. We had a scare once that one of our big accounts, UPS, had a new IT manager and he was a fan of IBM. When UPS management found out that switching to IBM would triple their IT budget they switched him out. Texas Instrument had some sort of RJE System which used too much plastic. Motorola started a division to do this called Four-Phase. Exxon tried to get into the office computer business. If you, for some reason, want to go down the rabbit hole of used IBM computers check out Saul Steinberg's Leasco. After he founded that and became a millionaire he tried to take over Chemical Bank. He has passed away, but his son is married to Maria Bartiromo. Also, checkout the OPM leasing scandal where the scammers took money from banks by getting loans against number sequences which they asserted were the serial numbers of IBM mainframes.
The small aluminum box is an AT&T 829. Western Electric was wholly owned by AT&T. Until the Carter Phone decision caused the break-up of Ma Bell the only way to be hooked up to the phone company was through phone company equipment. After the break up equipment that hooked up to the phone company had to have an FCC registration number on it. AT&T feared that if just anything was allowed to be hooked to their network it could endanger the network itself.
@@UsagiElectric It facilitated line testing. If a point-to-point line was thought to be out of service the phone company would send a tech to one end with a loopback generator. The loopback generator would send a tone to the remote end and put the other 829 into loopback and the tech could send to himself to see if the line itself was good. Note that a data line is four wire; a voice line is two wire. The plastic box on top of it with the circuit number is a "42A block". It is officially the point of demarcation: one side is phone company responsibility the other side is customer responsibility. At its peak if Western Electric were independent it would have been the eighteenth largest industrial company in the US.
In my grade school 40+ years ago Radio Shack (Tandy) - Gave our school a computer room full of there TRS-80 computers and each one had 2 5 1/4” floppy drives. 15 years later, I worked for IBM and they also had big computers like you have.
the first job my dad had was in demolition for making computer rooms in the 80s. literally busting out all the walls of an entire floor of a building to fill it with a big floor to ceiling computer. turns out its a lot easier to run through a wall than you'd think if you don't hit a stud. but it puts into perspective how big old computers were.
That is a multi-user system so nice to have extra terminals the terminals are most likely RS-232 300/1200 Baud the small modem is most likely 300/1200 I saw on the back of the terminal "Current Loop" so there current loop and not RS-232 the plate got settings printed on it that has to match the settings of te Comm card. ALSO, DO NOT Plug a DB-25 connector that is set for Current Loop into a RS-232 connection. I don't remember if Current Loop DB25 uses the unused pins for RS-232 for communication. It may, as a safety so you don't blow up the RS232 connection
Thank you for the heads up! The terminals are, interestingly, all from different years, but given the Miacom modem, I imagine there were a lot more terminals set up for use in the original setup. The Centurion fundamentally is a 9600-baud system, so I just need to get the settings right on the terminal, which is fairly easy to do. Unfortunately, so far, I haven't been able to get any life out of the MUX cards on the computer, though it does seem to actually be executing code!
Right! I'm so excited to work on this one and bring it back to life! I wanted to bring a CRT to life in one of my videos for ya, and I was blown away when the one on the end just kicked right on with no issues!
@@UsagiElectric thank you, i am sated knowing that it has a white phosphor! at least, it looks white. good luck with everything, we're all excited for you!!
You're absolutely right, thank you! Some of the NCR computers from back in the day were absolutely awesome looking, that's really cool that you got to work with one!
Band printer. I worked with some old SEL equipment and we had printer similar. That band spins continuously and the hammers are synced to bang against it at the proper moment. We had ones that were rated 600 lpm (600 lines per minute) so could actually go pretty darn fast.
Thank you! It's an awesome little computer. I've very nearly got it fully kitted out. Here's a picture of it from before I rearranged the shelves above it: i.postimg.cc/3R89xxWy/IMAG2815.jpg From far left to far right: Sanyo DMC-6013 Monitor, TI-99/4A, Speech Synthesizer, 32k Memory Expansion, RS-232 Interface, Phone Modem, Disk Controller, Solid State Printer, and Disk Drive. I would love to get my hands on a proper TI monitor one day, and I'm still holding out hope that I'll be able to find (and afford) both the Video Controller expansion and P-Code expansion someday. In the meantime, it's one of the coolest (if not most impractical) 8-bits(16-bits) I've had the pleasure of playing with!
@@UsagiElectric I loved mine. It's what got me into programming. I've always been into electronics and when I added programming to my skillset, I started having some real fun. I had the Speech Synthesizer with mine also. Couldn't afford the RS-232 expansion but, I did find a way to access the card edge connector on the back. I was big into CB Back in the 80's so, with a little programming and some discreet components (Switching transistors, relays, etc.) I hooked one of my radios through the card edge connector and created "Mad Max". He would talk for hours on the radio and everybody loved him. These days we have Arduinos, ESP-8266, Pi's and, the like but, back then, it was all about thinking outside the box. My box just so happened to be 2 blocks away in someone's driveway! I was really outside it. LOL!
Hi; On the Disk Drive with Removable platters, You need to put in the Platter cover on the Disk Platter after it is inserted in the Drive, Or it will not ever be "ready" .. The Drive is a CDC (Control Data) Cartridge Disk Drive Model 9427H.. THANK YOU Marty
that foam is like the stuff they used to put inside the plenum of automotive HVAC. so when you'd turn it on, you'd get a bunch of the particles in your face and eyes
You would generally have the terminal set to remote echo, as opposed to local echo, so that when you type the mini computer would return what you typed so that you would know that it received it as it has to service all of the connected terminals and either might have missed a character or not received it yet. It's a bit slower response, but more reliable.
I want a mini one day. A project I always wanted to do was make a basic modern PC but reverse-miniaturize some of the components so the whole thing can fit comfortably in an old mini and utilize all the space. If I was rich I'd build a 1950's computer to run RUclips and make the whole thing as big as a small city.
You and I are definitely cut from the same cloth, because that sounds awesome! With this one, I'm actually going to try to stuff everything into a single cabinet, which will open up the second cabinet for stuff. And I totally want to make the most insane discrete transistor homebrew computer that fills up the second cabinet, I think that would be epic!
A couple of my viewers linked me here and yep, this is awesome. Great-looking machine, can't go wrong with blue and woodgrain. Thanks for sharing the experience!
Whoa, excuse me while I fangirl out for a minute, haha.
Thank you so much for checking the video out! I'm super excited to get this thing up and going again, especially the printer. From what people have been telling me, that thing should be quite the event to watch in action!
@@UsagiElectric If Clint is here, I'm in the right place. lol
I still have an SMD hard drive sat on a shelf here, which was bought as part of trying to recover the files from the HDD of a Quantel Paintbox.
(the NEC drive was new-old stock, for only around £40 on Feebay. The Paintbox itself uses a Fujitsu M2294, and holds around 330MB.)
I love the look of the old minicomputers.
and after x months we have something from the 1970s that smells when you turn it on and is comparable to a PIC12C508
Howdy fellow lazy gamer
@Usagi Electric thank you for bringing golden times memories back! I started my professional life working with those "minis" ,,😄
Looking at your Centurion, I remembered the nights I have spent troubleshooting DECs... 😐
I think I have a guess for you. The caramel box besides your modem is probably a "terminal concentrator" or whatever Centurion has called it at the time.
Basically it permits the user to connect terminals and some times printers remotely. It uses the phone lines and modems like the one there to do so.
Regarding de terminals, I don't see the connection very well but they were usually RS-232. The interface and the terminal have to match in configuration. Speed and mode (full or half duplex) mismatched and nothing will work.
Try to build a loopback connector to test the terminals.
Good luck with your Centurion!!! 😄
The drive on the left is a CDC Hawk - Model 9427. When you fire it up, be sure you have vacuumed it out thoroughly, replace the hepa and prefilters, and pull the voice coil cable, and do a spin purge (cartridge loaded - but not the heads) for a day or two.
this is such a great memory for me
In 2003 I worked for a company as a part-time IT help desk and a part-time computer operator. The computer operator portion was basically baby-sitting an IBM AS/400 and the attached printer, which was similar to that one you got, but bigger. I would feed it a box of paper every morning and make sure the massive print job was successful.
My first job was programming the Centurion. 1977ish. Within a year , I was manager of programming and instsllations. Will be more than happy to enlighten you on it's place in that era. And what you have. I also have 2 oh tge sales brocures. And may have a CPL programming manual
Hi Jeff, I'm not sure if anyone's been in contact with you, the team working on this would love to connect. Most of the discussion is on discord (link in the episode description), where there's a handful of ex centurion employees (I am not one) contributing. If you do still have it, a CPL programming manual would be incredible.
Well, watching this video brought back memories from the the late seventies. That second disk drive looked very similar to the CDC 9427H drives I used to work on as a field service engineer. The Micom box is a serial multiplexer -- it takes all those serial port connections and time multiplex's the signals to go out as one serial port stream to a modem. We used 2400 and later 9600 baud modems over a dedicated line, no dial up required, which allowed the main computer to be used in more than one store. Got to admit that printer looked pretty funky. I worked on drum and band printers, besides good old dot-matrix and daisy-wheel printers;the best description I can think of for that thing is a chain printer.
A chain printer is exactly what it is.
Any idea what the capacity of one of those drives is?
@@timothy098-b4f the 14" hard drives in my S/34 were a whopping 13Mb each, so I'd guess probably in that neighborhood.
@@timothy098-b4f, I remember the 9427H as having a total capacity of 5 MB -- 2.5 MB on the fixed platter and another 2.5 MB on the disk cartridge. Normally, at least for my company, the data was mirrored between the two.
If this is from the 70s. Would the modems not be 300 baud?
wheyy thats mad!
Thank you!
Your SWTPC and Shelby's Data General helped get me interested in these old minicomputers, and I happen to have a garage big enough at the moment to hold one, so I figured there was no better time than right now to snatch this one up!
I worked at an auto parts store in the early 1980s, and the back office & point-of-sale system was based on a system similar to this, and had the same blue & beige terminals.
According to the DIP switch legend on the back of the terminal you powered up, self-echo was set to off. You might get text on the CRT if you turn it to on. At least the disc pack has the Control Data logo on it, so you may be able find service data for the drive on-line, but for the minicomputer itself?
That was absolutely it! I ran back out to the garage and gave it a test: i.postimg.cc/tJhfRy07/IMAG3685.jpg
I actually have the little user's manual that came with the drive itself, which is super cool. But, you're right, finding any information on the rest of the machine has been difficult for sure!
@@UsagiElectric that will give you doubled characters when you hook it up, no doubt.
You can try th eterminal with a linux machine to check it out properly.
9 months late, but this was my immediate thought too!
@@lostcarpark Yeah, on other brand machines it could be not "echo", but "duplex/semi-duplex", same meaning.
I think the smaller 'modem' is a leased-line modem. Those ran at fast rates for the time, upwards of 4800bps. The other box, the Micro 8000 looks to me not to be a modem but rather a concentrator/hub for a whole bunch of terminals to connect to it and then to the computer. I once owned a Data General MV4000DC that had a similar device.
I think you're right on the money about the Micro 8000, as that also explains why I got multiple terminals with the machine. It would make sense that the company using the machine would setup multiple workstations and then have them all multiplexed in through the Micro 8000.
I just looked up the Data General MV4000DC and that's a super cool looking machine! Looks much more compact than Centurion I have here, though if the Centurion used standard floppy disks, it'd be about the same size. Those CDC drives are massive!
I’ve seen and programmed packet switches that looked like that (x.25) The leased line may also be x.25, very common for the day.
Yep, that's how that works.
In 1987 I started work for data cabling company Unisys at the age of 18. We used to wire these kinds of systems together, soldering 25 pin or 37 D connectors on each end. I still do the same kind of work and now and again see some of the old cables in the roof spaces, from back when I installed them in the 80's.
I shed a tear at the kind of space available to you. You are so lucky! I love this sort of vintage tech as well, but I'm stuck in an apartment. What you have available to you is something that should be appreciated! I grew up on a farm, so I remember what that kind of space was like. Most of my collection is limited to a couple 80s era computers and 60s to 70s era calculators. Far too much is packed away in a storage unit. Wish i could spread all of it out. In the meanwhile, I will have to live vicariously through your space and your collection though, so have a sub! This channel looks awesome, and I can't wait to see what other retro stuff you've collected, and will collect in the future!
In the early 90's I got paid to haul a mainframe to the scrap yard, it broke my heart. I lived in a tiny mobile home trailer at the time or I would have gave it a new home.
A few suggestions:
1. Those two fan motors are for the absolute filters. The replaceable drive should be in that cabinet as well. Those old drives were very touchy when came to dust and other airborne stuff, you don't keep them clean-you have head crashes and replacement heads will be hard to come by.
2. Those are most likely ASCII terminals. (I agree, I think that one box is a concentrator for the other terminals) The serial setup can be problematic, in the old days you had to select baud rate, # of stop bits, parity (odd, even or none) and leased line modems you also had fuss time delays for high and low tones, echo suppression and other stuff I don't remember, you cannot believe how complex serial communication used to be. I think each of these db-25 plugs on the back of those each could drive a ASCII terminal.
3. If you run that printer much, you will want to replace the foam, that was for sound deadening. The chain printer weren't as noisey as drum printers, but they aren't known for silence.
Good luck with your project.
I have done this operation so many times. Once with my AS/400 mainframe, 11 cabinets and 30+ terminals. I loved the late 90s and the scrap out. I'm a new fan.
Takes me back to my Vaz 11/730 days. Before pulling out the drives, check the bottom front of the rack, there may be a pull out foot to stop the rack falling forward.
Wow, when I ran across this video and saw that cabinet on that computer with all the blue and wood like trim, it brought back some real memories I have not thought about in decades. When I was a young man in the mid 1970's I worked for a Motorola Two Way Radio Shop in West Texas. They became a sales rep. for a company I think was named Warex Computers in Dallas. Apparently, they handled the Centurion Minicomputers just like the one you have. We had one of these computers in our office and they put all their records in it. I will always remember the shop manager telling me to be sure and not stick my hand down inside those big hard drives with my wristwatch on. Of course, they were wind up then. It would magnetize it! I remember when they celebrated the sale of their first one in our area then. I believe it was on the order of $50K. For a small business that was a pretty good amount of money in those day. I had the opportunity to visit the Warex facility in Dallas and see what they did to checkout a system. I thought it all was just amazing and very exciting at the time. I certainly am no expert on these machines, but in the late 70's I cut my teeth on the Southwest Technical Products 6800 computer. It kicked off a great education and my future career in embedded controller design for automation. Thank you for a great video. I am glad I found your channel.
Sounds like you worked with Woody at Industrial Communication in Odessa, TX. I got to work one afternoon with one of Industrial Communication radio repair tech's on a radio (trunk mount car phone) that would not "key off" when the PTT was released. Problem was and open RF bypass capacitor on a cathode resistor. Even sleep a few nights in a travel trailer in the parking lot at Industrial Communication during the "Permian Basin Oil & Gas Show". FYI - We likely met when you visited the Warrex - Centurion office in Richardson, TX. Remember one of our largest & early customers was H. L. Brown Oil & Gas in Midland, TX . The founder of Warrex, John Warren was killed in a car accident on his way to H. L. Brown in 1976.
@@kenromaine2387 I worked in the radio shop and reported to Woody. I took care of the mobile telephone system they had then. I think it was made by Secode. I also assisted Albert with the answering service and all of his telephone wires everywhere😊. It was a really good experience for me then. I was there I believe from about 1975 into 1977. I was going to be working on the Warrex computer, however they decided I was better at working on the radios at the time.
Nice Austin Healey. Having restored a couple of Jensen Healey's, it makes perfect sense that you'd dive into a project like this if you can deal with Lucas wiring/components and not lose your mind. Just finished part 6 of the series and looking forward to more!
Thank you! It's actually been in the family longer than I have, haha.
But I'm right there with you, if someone can handle the Prince of Darkness' electronics, all other electronics seem a little simpler by comparison.
The Jensen Healey is a really cool car and I would love to drive one someday, Donald Healey had a particular flair that just made cars a little special!
That's the reason I clicked on the video. The info on the minicomputer was just icing on the cake.
I'm an MG owner and that's the first thing I noticed too :D
@@MistahMatzah my current project is an MGB :) great cars!
That Micom device is a serial mux. Basically takes all those serial ports and converts it to one port which can be sent to another matching device over probably a 9600 baud (or less) serial connection. ADP used to install tons of those into car dealerships...
That makes a lot more sense! And also helps explain why I got three data terminals in the deal as well. The company probably had the three terminals setup as work stations all hooked into the same machine. It's going to be a lot of fun trying to bring it all back to life!
Worked with one of these computers in the late 1980's. I am amazed that you were able find one. We had the computer, several terminals, a line printer (like the big one you have there), a couple of dot matrix printers and a 10meg Winchester drive that sat on top of the whole unit. When this thing was powered up, you could heat a small house! And the line printer would make you deaf. The early days of computing :) Thanks for sharing.
We bought a IBM PC with a 10 megabyte hard drive in 1984. We also bought a printer from the IBM salesman. Big desktop thing with tractor drives and serial ports. Then we had to buy an adapter to get the IBM printer to work with the IBM computer. Even the salesman was mystified by that one.
Man this is exciting, you're channel is like a glorious mash up of CuriousMarc, Ben Eater and Mr Carlson's Lab, the best! I do hope you get to tackle that old modem as part of this series. To give it something to talk to on the cheap you can knock up a little telephone network out of a RaspberryPi running Asterisk, a VOIP ATA adapter and maybe a pulse-to-tone converter. I love old modems, their linking of systems over the phone network was so brilliant back in the day. Best of luck with this restoration!
Thank you so much!
Interestingly, CuriousMarc and Ben Eater have been massive inspirations in getting the channel up and going. I've talked with CuriousMarc a few times, and he's just been an absolute legend!
You know, I've always wanted to get a Raspberry Pi, but never really found a good enough excuse to get one, but now I have that excuse! Time to start learning Linux! It'll be super interesting seeing how to get the old modem and everything linked together and talking with each other. This is all really new territory for me, so I'm really excited to learn about it!
The disk drive that loads from the top is a 9427H also know as a Hawk drive from CDC / MPI. The removable platter is 5 Meg and the fixed plater is also 5 Meg in size. The other drive is a 9448 CMD or cartridge module drive also known as a Phoenix with a 16 Meg removable cartridge. The fixed Platters varied depending on the number of heads installed, and could be 32, 64, or 96 meg.
I would expect one if not two of those cards in the cage are disk controllers responsible for interfacing to those drives.
Your joy and excitement is contagious.. I just met your channel and already loving it. You rock!
I’m sure someone will have pointed this out already, but the computer has the same color scheme as the car behind it. I’ve watched many videos in this series before coming across this one, so I had always thought that wasn’t an accident. Awesome computer!! Can’t wait to see it fully functional with the printer.
Simply admire any guy that buys an anchient comuter to match hisAustin Healey!
I grew up by the Austin works, leaving school in 79'. Restored a 3'0 litre in same colour combination as yours in the 90's at Charterhouse Garage in B'ham city centre!
Good luck with all your projects bud...Lee
A golden rule for powering up old equipment..... use a variac and ramp the voltage up very slowly.... over hours. Stuff tends to go BANG if you dont.
(16:23) That is a serial terminal concentrator with a modem.
You multiplex all of those serial lines down one duplex phone connection...
That makes a whole lot more sense, thank you for the information!
This is all a bit beyond me at the moment, but I'm excited to start learning more about it!
Yeah, it's not going to be very useful without it's mate.
wow, this channel was a surprise. My father worked at the Swedish Solar Telescope wich relocated from Italy to the Canary Island of La Palma in 1979, they used to have a big PDP 11/34 down in the basement and the most massive printer I´ve ever seen. Eventually they upgraded (?) to a Sinclair ZX Spectrum that run the software for the tracking engines that makes it possible for the telescope to follow the sun. When they changed the mirrors sometimes around the mid- to late 1980s they got into these very modern micros reminiscent to what we use today. (I guess you just can´t have one of the world´s best solar telescope being controlled to what is basically a toy.) In the early 1990s the telescopes of the Isaac Newton Group still had racks with these huge reel- to reel data tapes.
You should contact Marc from the CuriousMarc YT channel, he has quite a bit of experience with aligning those Diablo removable hard disks.
I think I definitely will send Marc an e-mail once I get further stuck into working on them. I'm sure there's a lot of similarities with the Xerox system he restored a while back! Plus, Marc is just a generally awesome guy, so any excuse to talk to him is a good one in my book, haha.
0:53 Minicomputers were cheaper and lower-spec in many ways. Mainframes had elaborate I/O controllers to handle high throughput without burdening the CPU. This made them great for batch operations (like a lot of business data processing -- payroll, cheque reconciliations and the like). But then this new thing called “interactive” computing came on the scene, but it was not an efficient way to use an expensive mainframe. Minis, on the other hand, were ideal.
Another interesting thing I've been discovering about Minicomputers is that they were primarily just for storing a large amount of data! Centurion did write their own proprietary software (word processor, spreadsheets, etc.), but their primary market was the ability for multiple users to create data and store it on the disk packs. The Hawk drive, which was the drive that was initially in the computer when it was built in 1979/1980, had I believe 10MB removable platters, which was massive compared to the standard floppies of the day. The Phoenix drive that was in the second chassis offered something like 40MB of data on the removeable platters which is an insane amount of data!
@@UsagiElectric How did they back up that data? Hard drives were and are unreliable, and removable drives are even more vulnerable to trouble. It was common to do backups to tape, but your system didn’t seem to have any tape drive.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 I can't speak for this system but the systems I worked on of this vintage were backed up to tape like yousaid but at the mainframe end. So, Bendix Flight, Bendix Aviation, and Bendix Guidance were all in an enormous building in Teterboro, New Jersey, but all of the actual processing was done in their headquarters in Southfield, Michigan. This system would have been RJE, Remote Job Entry where the data was uploaded every night to a mainframe somewhere, or a batch system where the data was sent to a mainframe and processed over night and sent back the next day.
I started on a Prime “Mini” computer in 1978. I programmed in Fortran and machine code on Punch cards then shortly a VDT. Always has a place in my heart.
That's awesome that you got to actually work with a Mini back in the day!
From the extremely limited documentation I've found so far, it seems like Centurion sold a Fortran interpreter with their Minicomputers too. Fortran was the go-to programming language for a long time it appears!
I had a chance to take an entire IBM 370 system. Drives, cpu, printers, software, the whole working system. It going to the scrap heap. I couldn’t do it, no place to store it. Broke my heart.
Epic, reminds me of the time i got a 60s PA system from a factory. It filled an entire van and weight a ton, had 4 philips tube amps, pre-amp,tuner, 2 turntables, 2 reel recorders and a microphone all built into one giant custom steel cabinet. i now also found a partial ibm system from the 60s.
Decades ago I worked for a Dutch company called Compair. They bought old MAI mini computers, cleaned, spray painted them and put a nice new plastic Compair decal on.
I was just the delivery driver. Those things were insanely heavy.
I used to work on the first type of drive. You have to run them with the heads locked to "purge" the dust off the platters.... for 12hrs once the filters were changed. .Very very heavy.
Whoa, that's awesome that you used to work with them!
That's a good tip about running them to purge the dust off. They're a really interesting bit of history and kind of wild to see in person, and they are indeed very, very heavy, haha.
Beautiful wood and powder-blue. Priceless "floppy drives" :)
I immediately recognized the DRAM chip family (I built a 64 KiB board with a close relative - I still need to restore that computer). The MCM 41168 is a 16Kx1 DRAM. It looks like a 9x8 arrangement, so probably actually 8x8 which means 128 KiB on this board. I'm curious about the CPU driving it. Everything suggests Z-80 with banked memory, but I hope we find something more interesting. (But do open, clean, and inspect before powering on more stuff please).
Thank you!
And I'm really digging the color scheme, more computers need pastel colors and genuine wood accents! I couldn't figure out the right terminology for those drives. They're not quite hard disks, though the platters are just like hard disks, but they're not quite floppy disks, though they do have removable cartridges like a floppy. I'm sure they have a proper name, but it sure wasn't coming to me, haha.
That's awesome that you build a DRAM board like that, I can't imagine the diligence required to get it all wired up correctly!
As for the CPU, you'll be pleased to know it is a bit more interesting than a Z80: i.postimg.cc/63KLkQF6/IMAG3642.jpg
At a quick glance, it looks like there are two AMD AM2901 4-bit bit-slice ALUs and two AMD 2909 4-bit bit-slice address sequencers, and then a colossal amount of 7400 series logic ICs. As we get further in the build, each board is going to get a close inspection just to get a rough idea of how it works and replace any bad caps that look to be hanging about.
I actually wasn't going to power anything on, but I figured I had a spare terminal if one blew up, so I just went for it!
Is that an MG? Mainframes and British sports cars were two passions my dad had. He installed the first IBM mainframes at the Pentagon.
I'm so glad this video was recommended to me! This is quite fascinating, I barely recall these types of computer systems. They were just phasing out, as I really became interested in them (early 80's), but I am extremely fascinated with this vintage technology! Thanks for documenting this process, I'm "in" for sure!
the printer is a Band Printer most likely a Data Product Line Printer it may have been a 300 LPM/600LPM Printer, the Disk drives most likely were Control Data Winchester drive you had a removable drive on top and a sealed Winchester drive below. I worked for DEC on PDP11 systems and DEC VAX systems back in 1978-85. I worked on RP06/7 Disk drives, RK05/6/7 Disk Drive, LP05/06 Line printers. PDP11/34A, 40, 50 , 60, 70, VAX 11/780, 11/750.
I think the printer might actually be a little slower than that at just 150 LPM. I found an ad for a Centurion system in a magazine from 1983 and that was what they listed for the printer, but the only way to know for sure will be to power this bad boy and let it churn through some paper!
The drives are actually CDC made drives, the older one is a Hawk drive and the newer one is a Phoenix drive. I go through them in a bit more detail in the next part of the series, but in Part 8 we actually take a look at the platters and it's not great news. They're on the back burner for the time being.
That's awesome that you worked for DEC! I have a buddy with a PDP11 and I'm sure he'd love to pick your brain!
@@UsagiElectric I'm pretty sure that Hawk drives are SMD drives (or CMD?), if you really really wanted to you may possibly be able to grab a modern solid state SMD replacement (obviously would allow you to play with images so much more easily as I think you can attach to these drives via a modern PC as well. It's not hard to find ppl who know a lot more about this, put a feeler out on cctalk/cctech!)
People are equally confused when they find out "medium voltage" starts at 1,000 volts.
That's so true! It really blew my mind when someone actually explained that a 600V audio amplifier is technically considered low voltage. Mind you, it'll still knock you across the room if you put your finger in the wrong spot, haha.
@@UsagiElectric Unfortunately most people think "low voltage" means it's safe. Tell them that mains is low voltage, then get into Safety Extra Low Voltage and Functional Extra Low Voltage and heads asplode.
@@ian_b My tube computer is being built entirely in SELV, which is mental for tubes to be operating that low, but in the scale of voltages, pretty much all tube operated stuff classifies as low voltage anyways, haha.
@@UsagiElectric The "low voltage" that always scared me as an electrician/engineer was "low voltage" battery sets at 960V :)
@@ian_b Haha, that's just mean! Just barely sneaking in under the low voltage classification!
Oh man! I CANNOT WAIT for this series to unfold! SO FASCINATING! This may inspire me to pull my old NEC Astra 220 Mini out of storage and finally try to do something with it. As it stands now, I wouldn’t even know how to begin...
Thank you!
I'm super excited about digging in to this one too!
I googled NEC Astra 220 mini and couldn't even find pictures of one, so it sounds like you've got your hands on a rare machine! You should definitely bust it out and get it up and running (and take lots of pics to show me, haha).
Centurion computer, great project :) The printer is a Band printer, was in common use before dot-matrix printer, don't be surprised, the printer might write very fast, we had one that wrote 10+ pages pr. minute. The terminal is properly simple VT100 terminal or something like that. RS232 or current loop. The CPU board is properly made of 74-series chips and an a (EP)ROM for instruction decoding.
The harddrives are propery 5 or 10 Mb :)
Thank you!
And 10+ pages per minute is insane! I mean, I had an inkjet printer just out of college that couldn't go that fast (granted, it was a pretty trashy printer, haha). Now, I'm even more excited to get that printer up and going. Even if it just types out the test print page, it'll be exciting to see it in action!
The CPU board looks to be like two AMD AM2901 4-bit bit-slice ALUs and two AMD 2909 4-bit bit-slice address sequencers, and then a colossal amount of 7400 series logic ICs. It's super cool and I can't wait to dive into it in more detail: i.postimg.cc/63KLkQF6/IMAG3642.jpg
@@UsagiElectric Band or chain printers are quite loud. You might be sorry you took the foam out....
@@stevenscherbinski1512 The foam was falling out on it's own in most places, so it needed to come out so as not to damage anything. I may go back and line the inside with sound deadening material like Dynamat or something. It'll probably add another 30 pounds to the machine, but may keep it from making my ears bleed. I'm super excited to see this thing run though!
They are ADDS Regent 40, ADDS Regent 100, and ADDS Viewpoint terminals.
Used to work at a hotel that had a minicomputer in the back office to run the property management system. When you put the disk into the drive, you'd flip the case over and put it on top to store it
That's awesome that you got to use a Mini in its element!
Just watched through the series so far. Excellent series of videos! You deserve to be way more famous in the vintage computer space of RUclips than you are! I'm doing my part by liking and commenting on all of your videos! Cheers!
I Can not wait to see how nice the blue paint turns out after major cleaning.
This looks pretty cool.
You are really lucky that black foam just dried out and crumbled to dust. I work on vintage analog synthesizers and many of them had black foam inside to dust proof the slide potentiometer controls on them and it actually reverts to liquid form with age and turns into a black, super sticky tar that is a real pain to remove without damaging paintwork or the pots themselves.
My dad worked in sales in the tape and disk division of Control Data for years in the 70s and 80s. Seeing the CDC logo brought back a flood of memories.
Oh man. My Dad bought a Wang 2200 minicomputer for his business back in 1978. He ran that thing for a good 10+ years until ‘88 or ‘89. They were so expensive that you simply did not replace them for that long. You just upgraded them a bit at a time and kept going. Wish I could find one of those in good condition.
Really looking forward to watching your other videos about this awesome relic.
Oh man, She is a thing of beauty. This is going to be one hell of a series.
Thank you!
It's going to be a lot of fun flipping back and forth between the tube computer and this big beast!
@@UsagiElectric I wonder if you could somehow use one of the termilnals on the valve computer. Although I would'nt even know where to begin with that. :) Just an idle thought.
@@frankowalker4662 Actually, I think that might be something that's totally doable! The terminals are just a 20mA current loop, so they're expecting serial data at a specific baud rate, and that's about it. That may be something worth trying in the future!
@@UsagiElectric Wow, realy? Cool. :)
OH, I love this thing! A true Forgotten Machine! And you tell the story SO SO WELL!!!
From what I read about Centurion when I paused the vid, it appears they did turnkey business solutions and the hardware they used, at least the disk drives, are Control Data Corporation products. The line printer looks like something I used way back when I first started in the industry, only the brand was Data 100 and the color scheme was mustard and black. The external appearance other than color was exactly the same. It had that same black foam sound deadening material inside the lid, and appeared to be the same mechanically inside. I remember ours used to get paper jams regularly. One thing you don't have, though, is tape drives. The mux and modem would have been for communication on a leased data line to some other location.
Data 100 was acquired by Northern Telecom but retained the branding and color scheme. For some reason my company used this setup to act as a remote site to our IBM mainframes located in Houston (and occasionally to some other places) rather than use IBM equipment to do that job. I recall that we had some emulator programs to allow our system to run like various other company's hardware to access reports and do other work, but mostly we emulated an IBM RJE station to submit and output batch jobs to and from our Big Blue systems.
At least as a chain printer it wasn't likely to have the kind of paper jam complications that the early drum printers could have. The "Printer On Fire" error code in many UNIX versions didn't start out as a joke.
@@evensgrey We had a Data 100 drum printer before the chain printer was added as a supplement. The drum printer - at least the one we had - was fine, very few problems. The chain printer was a never ending problem source, and slow to boot. Later we got rid of it and added a newer model printer which was Data 100's clone of the IBM 1403, IIRC. For all I know IBM built it for them in their colors. Or perhaps Data 100 licensed the design from IBM.
That Micom unit is basically a digital "PABX" for switching serial RS-232 connections. I installed and managed a Micom 600 system which occupied three 6 foot racks and had several hundred of those cards. It was the digital switching unit for all the terminals and computer systems in the university where I worked back in the late 1980s. I still have a couple of the cards and the operating/configuration manual as souvenirs from that system after it was de-commissioned around 1993. You probably won't have any use for the Micom unless you plan to connect many terminals to your computer.
Well darn. Hellorld! [foreshadowing] This was the first video I saw on the channel. It's been quiet a ride! You have something unique and interesting here, and I don't just mean the Centurion but the channel itself and all your other projects.
Perhaps it seems slow but the channel is growing, and I feel it is on the verge of blowing up. Quality will not be denied. I hope you never feel discouraged because you have something great here!
The first business computer I used was a Data General they installed in an auto parts store I worked at. At the end of each night I had to swap out one of those removable disk platters which sort of backed up the day's data. All these components look very similar so I'd say this puts the system squarely in the early 1980s era. Completely underwhelming as an actual computer but at the time, it was a great way to manage a business that was previously done manually with general ledgers and a huge card desk for tracking inventory.
My grandfather ran a small business, and from the mid-1970s through to 1990, brought home a removable CDC disc pack every weekend. (The bookkeeper brought one home on the other days.) It was significantly more primitive than the Centurion, but having core memory and being single user meant that you could punch in the hex address of the point where it failed after a power outage.)
I wouldn't be jacking media in and out of the drives until you get some instructions. The relationship of the heads and media was precise and delicate. There was one way to install or remove media and 99 thousand ways to do it wrong. With the power off I'm particularly concerned. Maybe someone who knows exactly can chime in -
they will need to be aligned or the first time you spin them up, the heads will crash,
and then you can toss the entire drive in the garbage!
Thank you for the heads up!
I was looking at the drive and it looked like the read heads are swung out of the way, so I figured just setting the media in place would be alright as long as I didn't put any power into it (I also chose a disk that didn't seem to have any important notes on it in case it became a sacrificial disk). Though, to be honest, I'm more worried about the fact that it's been moved around a lot presumably without having been locked down into place.
At any rate, both drives are going to come out of the chassis for a cleaning, inspection and alignment, hopefully to avoid a head crash in the future!
4:57 But your smartphone can't support three users and run a business.
takes me back to college and my first job. At work we had a MUCH larger set of mini computers, a vax cluster, and a MODCOMP classic II. 4 racks, 6 feet high. washing machine sized 60 MB removable hard disks, and a big brother to your chain printer that could go so fast the green bar paper would shoot in a loop 4 feet high pout the top as it printed. The one in the college was even larger. A DEC System20. its lots of fun to get these old machines running again. If you have old 4kx1 static rams on the memory cards they are likely to have lots of issues. 16k drams are similarly unreliable - very susceptible to radiation damage from the tiny amount of c-13 in the plastic cases on the chips. NOS ceramic case military/aerospace parts form that era are still functional, but the commercial plastic encapsulated parts are a total crap shoot - less than 25% still work in my experience
Four racks, six feet high is a ridiculously huge computer! I was checking out pictures of that Modcomp Classic II, and man alive it seems all the mini-computers of the 70s had fantastic switches on the front of them!
The DEC System 20 is massive! I would love to be able to climb around all these old massive minicomputers one of these days.
On this Centurion, it looks like it has a bunch of 2kx1 MCM4116 DRAM chips. Fortunately, all the DRAMs are socketed, so if I have a bad one I won't have to do a bunch of desoldering. Though, I have no idea how reliable the MCM4116 is - I'm hoping they're decent chips and I won't have to end up replacing most of them.
@@UsagiElectric they are unfortunately still fairly flaky but not as bad as the 16kx1 chips. Old drsms are also super sensitive to power supply start sequence. It's vital that the negative supply come up first, then the 12v then the 5. In that era this was usually "garunteed" by the size of the supply filters. If the capacitors have degraded or failed it can cause catastrophic damage as a result of forward biased parasitic diodes in the chip substrates. Check the power supplies under some load with resistors to ensure they come up correctly before you power up the main cpu, or pull out the ram cards the first time and just look at voltages and ripple. If its like many smaller systems of that vintage it may have highr voltages one the backplane like 8 and 16 which are regulated down to +-5 and 12 with 78/9xx series regulators on the boards, or bigger lm340 types in TO3 packages. Again carefully inspect the electrolytics around any such, even test them if you can. That is a common point of failure even at the time and those capacitors usually don't improve with age.
Damn, this brings back memories of me and a friend doing a road trip to pick up a Data General Nova 3 around 20 years ago.
I love those hard drives from the days that they were interchangeable and loaded/unloaded almost in the manner an optical disc has been for the last 25 years or so. GREAT find, I wish I had room to store and tinker with one of these bad boys. I love how stoked you are.Subbed, I can't wait to see the rest of this.
A mincomputer like this was my first ever experience with a computer when my father would take me to the office after work when he was doing stuff, and one day he sat me at the terminal and got me doing data entry - at age 7 - and I was hooked. The guy who'se job I was doing after hours would come in and find a good half-hour or more of his workload was taken care of on some days and it confused the hell out of him, according to Dad until he finally told him. ;-)
As suggested, please don't power up the disk pack drives. They have to be cleaner than an operating theater or you will kill it within seconds. When we used to change the absolute filters on the phoenix drives we ran them for 40 minutes just to purge the filter before we would put the drive online. And that was in a computer room designated as a 'clean room'. The disks have to be spotless too. I doubt anyone could change the heads today and back in the 80's it cost £1,000 back then! By the way, you stow the disk pack cover over the top of the disk pack once it is inserted into the drive. It keeps it clean.
Thank you for the insight!
The drives actually were both in pretty rough shape, and both suffered head crashes years before I got my hands on them. I show them in more detail in Part 2 and in Part 8.
Here's the full playlist: ruclips.net/p/PLnw98JPyObn0wJFdbcRDP7LMz8Aw2T97V
This feels like watching a ancient slow moving giant rising from its grave. Still working even. So, so cool.
When you are only looking at these maschines, you get that curious and sentimental feeling like in the final scene of "terminator 2" in the 70's, 80's command-center for the third world war.
👏🏻😀👍🏻🙏🏻
It was pretty good foresight of you to have your car painted in these colours too
Wold be nice to drive thay convertible, while your Centurion minicomp plays mp3 recordings, on the backseat!
Haha, it was meant to be!
@@AlejandroLopez-qd3xm Oh man, the suspension would just bottom out loading the Centurion into the car!
Wow, tried googling the hardware details about this Centurion Mini Computer, but didn’t have much luck. I am totally amazed that you were able to restore this machine.
In 1980, my uncle's engineering firm upgraded their system and I suddenly found myself in possession of a DEC PDP-12, four VT78 units, two reel-to-reel data banks, and a "spacious" 8 megabyte hard drive the size of a laundromat dryer. The total of the lot occupied more than half my parent's garage and generated enough heat to melt lead in that garage.
Oh man, that was an excellent score! The PDP-12 is a gorgeous little machine, and to get the reel-to-reel data banks with it is awesome! I would love to play around with one of those someday!
I had worked on PDP11 systems Plus I had an account using several PDP -8s. I had one account that had an old 20MB drive that was a mechanical detent for the heads vs the Voice coils of the later drives. boy did that make noise when you ran disk seek Diags on it to test the R/W heads.
Nice acquisition! Very interested to see the progression. Would be interesting to try and decode the backplane and make new expansion cards to it.
Thank you!
You know, given all the PCBs I've made on this channel, making a new expansion card for this never dawned on me, but now I totally want to!
I don't care about the computer - I just clicked to see your Healey. That was my first car when I was 16, and mine was always more reliable than my friend's Fords and Chevy's and never went to a garage.
Anybody who can work on a tube radio can easily fix that Austin product from the same era.
This video is history! It is the start of a legendary series
I love the enthusiasm and excitement here, in the fact of all the unknowns; and yet we live in a time when there should stil be people around who used these, to help out :P All the electronics and computing nerds are gawping at the screen right now. thank you :)
Thank you so much!
I'm genuinely excited to get this thing up and going! There's a ton of stuff for me to learn too and the community, both here and on other social media platforms, have all banded together and just absolutely knowledge bombed me with fantastic information and resources. That's going to make this restoration actually doable!
Well, a mini truck for a mini computer, a match made in heaven. ;)
Back in the 80s and 90s I had a friend (a sysop for a state Bell Telephone by profession) had a minicomputer (confusingly named an Alpha Micro) in his basement, with three terminals. I was one of several friends that used it for personal word processing. He passed away years ago, no idea what became of his system. It likewise had a Hawk drive, don't remember the model, but it was 5MB (yes, "meg") fixed and 5MB removable. Looked pretty much identical to the one you have. He used an IMSAI front panel for it, and on occasion he actually USED the front panel switches to enter opcodes.
Alpha Micro was a computer company from the late 1970s.
It's kinda funny how you're so amazed by all this stuff.... back when I was at college, this was basically what computers were like. ;)
Being born in the 80s, I was aware of this stuff growing up, but I was never really interested in 70s computing until recently. Now that I'm diving into it, there's all sorts of amazing stuff to learn!
Its going to be so exciting to see this running.
We're not there yet, but I think it's making food progress!
I seen somewhere that for the 50th anniversary of the ENIAC they basically showed how technology has changed by taking the giant room size computer and were able to put the same processing power on a chip that was 4 square inches.
And the 50th anniversary of the ENIAC was way back in 1995, nowadays, that same amount of processing power is so small, it roughly the size of the head of a pin!
@@UsagiElectric Crazy isnt it?
Thanks. Congratulations! You've achieved the Batcave [circa 1966]. All things considered, I'd probably go with "Captain Thunderbird". Speaking of which - Holy anachronisms, Batman! I never thought I'd actually see blue-bar paper again (outside of an old movie). You're really putting those Amiga people to shame! ;) tavi.
They would have done you a favor if they had left one of those removable disc packs in the drive. When they are in, that big opening is somewhat sealed by the plastic cover. As it is, the retractable heads in the side of the machine are probably dirty as heck and will self-destruct if they try to load. We had some larger 300 MB 'washing machine size' drives and used to replace individual heads. Then there was a whole alignment pack and break out the O-scope to align them. What memories. :)
"A quick clean" is something that you should probably do with every used computer one buys...
Was always curious about this computing class myself, so thanks for sharing this series, as now I don't feel the need to run out and get one myself! :)
"Warrex Centurion, an 8-bit minicomputer built by Warrex (later just Centurion), a Texas based company from the late 1970's to the 1980's. The Am2909 and Am2911 microprogram sequencers and the Am2901 ALU were used in the CPU6 variant." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Am2900
You searched far and wide for a mini computer that matches your car, didn't you?
Hello, i follow your Project with very Interest, but the first Episode i missed anyway! Thanks for this very cool Project! And i LOVE this Music! Blessing!!! 💝💝💝
That type of printer is called a "Chain Printer". They were known for high-speed at the time.
I've been watching a few videos on these types of printers and it's insane just how fast they are! I can't wait to see this one fire up and spit out some high-speed prints!
@@UsagiElectric If you want a fast waste paper generator, get a line printer.
ruclips.net/video/X6oUGv3M5ec/видео.html
I used to service these back in the day. They chew through boxes of listing paper per day.
Line printers and chain printers are noisy as hell, so you may want to look at replacing some of that sound deadening foam.
@@AndyHullMcPenguin Dang, that thing can move some paper through it!
I'm blown away by these insane printers, I can't believe I never knew about them until now. I mean that line printer can easily outrun a standard modern laser printer!
The foam definitely had to come out, but I think I will most likely end up lining it with some sound deadening material in the future. Fortunately, I don't think the computer and printer will ever make it's way inside, so being noisy in the garage is totally alright.
@@UsagiElectric Line printers and other impact printers have some useful characteristics that mean they are still used in some situations.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_printer
Impact printers for example produce true copies, in other words if you put a duplicating paper in them, then all of the copies can be shown forensically to have been produced in the same impact operation. This makes forging copies a rather tricky if not impossible task.
The Genicom in the previous video is a dot matrix comb printer. They were interesting to work on as they had hundreds of impact needles, hundreds of driver transistors in arrays to drive them and so forth. As a result, they were typically very quick, and somewhat expensive. Repairing them was quite a lucrative aspect of our business back then. If a typical dot matrix printer was several hundred pounds, a line printer might be thousands, or in some cases tens of thousands.
Known for high speed and noise!
They were called minicomputers because transistor/chip mainframes were the prevailing systems that a (big) business purchased. 1970s-80s. Vacuum tube analog computers were already gone and moved to storage warehouses, by early-mid 70s. Networked PCs began taking over the scene in the late 80s, and took over from minicomputers in the 90s.
In the late 80's I used to go to a local auction house that sold various thing anyone would bring in. A couple of days before the auction, you could come in a look at the items to be auctioned off. I wen't in the one day and there was this IBM mainframe system with 1 printer, 3 terminals, cables, software and manuals. The computer stood about 54" tall, 36" deep and 80" long. the printer was about 48" high, 30" deep and 30" wide. Well, of course, I had to go there tat Sunday night to see what it was going to sell for, with no intentions of buying it. When they got to the IBM, I can't remember what the bidding started at, but the price kept coming down and down. It came all the way down to $5.00 and I raised my hand and it sold for $5.00. I paid a guy $25.00 to load it up on his trailer and take it to my parents house.
Color me all the shades of jealous! That is an absolutely amazing deal for anything old and IBM, even if it was in the late 80's. Do you still have the system, or know where it is? I would love to see more about it, that sounds like a really epic machine!
The "secret" of all these mini-computer companies is that the IBM equivalent was easily three times as much. I worked for two, Sycor, and Data 100 which were merged under the ownership of Northern Telecom. Our customers would at contract's end replace us with the competition and when we went to take out our equipment we would recognize the techs from the other company putting in their stuff. We had a scare once that one of our big accounts, UPS, had a new IT manager and he was a fan of IBM. When UPS management found out that switching to IBM would triple their IT budget they switched him out. Texas Instrument had some sort of RJE System which used too much plastic. Motorola started a division to do this called Four-Phase. Exxon tried to get into the office computer business.
If you, for some reason, want to go down the rabbit hole of used IBM computers check out Saul Steinberg's Leasco. After he founded that and became a millionaire he tried to take over Chemical Bank. He has passed away, but his son is married to Maria Bartiromo. Also, checkout the OPM leasing scandal where the scammers took money from banks by getting loans against number sequences which they asserted were the serial numbers of IBM mainframes.
Can't wait to see this running.
Me too!
The small aluminum box is an AT&T 829. Western Electric was wholly owned by AT&T. Until the Carter Phone decision caused the break-up of Ma Bell the only way to be hooked up to the phone company was through phone company equipment. After the break up equipment that hooked up to the phone company had to have an FCC registration number on it. AT&T feared that if just anything was allowed to be hooked to their network it could endanger the network itself.
Whoa, so far you're the only person that has been able to identify that little box!
Thank you for the excellent information!
@@UsagiElectric It facilitated line testing. If a point-to-point line was thought to be out of service the phone company would send a tech to one end with a loopback generator. The loopback generator would send a tone to the remote end and put the other 829 into loopback and the tech could send to himself to see if the line itself was good. Note that a data line is four wire; a voice line is two wire. The plastic box on top of it with the circuit number is a "42A block". It is officially the point of demarcation: one side is phone company responsibility the other side is customer responsibility.
At its peak if Western Electric were independent it would have been the eighteenth largest industrial company in the US.
In my grade school 40+ years ago Radio Shack (Tandy) - Gave our school a computer room full of there TRS-80 computers and each one had 2 5 1/4” floppy drives. 15 years later, I worked for IBM and they also had big computers like you have.
the first job my dad had was in demolition for making computer rooms in the 80s. literally busting out all the walls of an entire floor of a building to fill it with a big floor to ceiling computer. turns out its a lot easier to run through a wall than you'd think if you don't hit a stud. but it puts into perspective how big old computers were.
That is a multi-user system so nice to have extra terminals the terminals are most likely RS-232 300/1200 Baud the small modem is most likely 300/1200 I saw on the back of the terminal "Current Loop" so there current loop and not RS-232 the plate got settings printed on it that has to match the settings of te Comm card. ALSO, DO NOT Plug a DB-25 connector that is set for Current Loop into a RS-232 connection. I don't remember if Current Loop DB25 uses the unused pins for RS-232 for communication. It may, as a safety so you don't blow up the RS232 connection
Thank you for the heads up!
The terminals are, interestingly, all from different years, but given the Miacom modem, I imagine there were a lot more terminals set up for use in the original setup. The Centurion fundamentally is a 9600-baud system, so I just need to get the settings right on the terminal, which is fairly easy to do. Unfortunately, so far, I haven't been able to get any life out of the MUX cards on the computer, though it does seem to actually be executing code!
this is so exciting!!!!!! those monitors are so beautiful. that ceramic IC was pretty cool too!
Right! I'm so excited to work on this one and bring it back to life!
I wanted to bring a CRT to life in one of my videos for ya, and I was blown away when the one on the end just kicked right on with no issues!
@@UsagiElectric thank you, i am sated knowing that it has a white phosphor! at least, it looks white. good luck with everything, we're all excited for you!!
If this was considered mini back then, I can't imagine what a full sized computer would be!
A full size computer then would have taken up the room of a gymnasium.......
The media disks are called disk packs. We had them on our NCR mainframe.
You're absolutely right, thank you!
Some of the NCR computers from back in the day were absolutely awesome looking, that's really cool that you got to work with one!
The bunny at the end of the video was very special 🐰 ❤️
Band printer. I worked with some old SEL equipment and we had printer similar. That band spins continuously and the hammers are synced to bang against it at the proper moment. We had ones that were rated 600 lpm (600 lines per minute) so could actually go pretty darn fast.
The beg
Lite brown box made by mycom is an interface for multiple terminals. Each db25 is a rs232 terminal port.
God, that 99/4A brings back some VERY fond memories!
Thank you! It's an awesome little computer.
I've very nearly got it fully kitted out. Here's a picture of it from before I rearranged the shelves above it: i.postimg.cc/3R89xxWy/IMAG2815.jpg
From far left to far right: Sanyo DMC-6013 Monitor, TI-99/4A, Speech Synthesizer, 32k Memory Expansion, RS-232 Interface, Phone Modem, Disk Controller, Solid State Printer, and Disk Drive. I would love to get my hands on a proper TI monitor one day, and I'm still holding out hope that I'll be able to find (and afford) both the Video Controller expansion and P-Code expansion someday.
In the meantime, it's one of the coolest (if not most impractical) 8-bits(16-bits) I've had the pleasure of playing with!
@@UsagiElectric I loved mine. It's what got me into programming. I've always been into electronics and when I added programming to my skillset, I started having some real fun. I had the Speech Synthesizer with mine also. Couldn't afford the RS-232 expansion but, I did find a way to access the card edge connector on the back. I was big into CB Back in the 80's so, with a little programming and some discreet components (Switching transistors, relays, etc.) I hooked one of my radios through the card edge connector and created "Mad Max". He would talk for hours on the radio and everybody loved him. These days we have Arduinos, ESP-8266, Pi's and, the like but, back then, it was all about thinking outside the box. My box just so happened to be 2 blocks away in someone's driveway! I was really outside it. LOL!
Hi;
On the Disk Drive with Removable platters, You need to put in the Platter cover on the Disk Platter after it is inserted in the Drive, Or it will not ever be "ready" ..
The Drive is a CDC (Control Data) Cartridge Disk Drive Model 9427H..
THANK YOU Marty
Thanks for the tip!
Fortunately, in the next video after removing the drives, I was able to identify them grab some manuals for them from bitsavers!
that foam is like the stuff they used to put inside the plenum of automotive HVAC. so when you'd turn it on, you'd get a bunch of the particles in your face and eyes
You would generally have the terminal set to remote echo, as opposed to local echo, so that when you type the mini computer would return what you typed so that you would know that it received it as it has to service all of the connected terminals and either might have missed a character or not received it yet. It's a bit slower response, but more reliable.
I want a mini one day. A project I always wanted to do was make a basic modern PC but reverse-miniaturize some of the components so the whole thing can fit comfortably in an old mini and utilize all the space. If I was rich I'd build a 1950's computer to run RUclips and make the whole thing as big as a small city.
You and I are definitely cut from the same cloth, because that sounds awesome! With this one, I'm actually going to try to stuff everything into a single cabinet, which will open up the second cabinet for stuff. And I totally want to make the most insane discrete transistor homebrew computer that fills up the second cabinet, I think that would be epic!
Got to love these serial terminal i/o beasties
You showed up in my recommended one minute ago and in that one minute you successfully earned yourself one new subscriber. :3
Thank you so much, and thank you for subscribing!