Restoring a $25k Convergent Technologies Miniframe CTIX Unix Computer [video]

Wow, this brings back memories! Around 1986, I used to work for a state government electronics company in India, and we tied up with Convergent to build their Unix servers in India. We chose the MightyFrame, bigger and more powerful than the MiniFrame in the video. I remember travelling several times to the Bay Area to understand the product and how to manufacture it.

Not that we really learned how to do that: Convergent had a high-volume manufacturing line with high levels of automation. They destructively heat tested at least 25-30 servers before starting to ship, while our entire production was expected to be 50-75!

Had to design a totally different production process with manual placement of components, a simple wave soldering machine, a row of women doing rework and jumpering on the soldered PCBs and R&D / Design engineers like me transferring to manufacturing for several months to make all this happen. Had a blast, though, and we built them well, and the product sold well in India.

LOL At this point of my career I was the VP of Marketing of Convergent's Unix division which included the Miniframe. Our ad for the product - which I think I still have - said, "It's not how big it is, it's how well it performs."

Is there another video yet?

The real achievement here is reading the old hard drive. He's recovered most of the software. Even cracked some old user passwords.

The machine is vanilla - it's a Motorola 68010. The peripherals are standard for the era. It might have some strange MMU, because it's from the era when Motorola had a good CPU but was years late with the MMU. (If Motorola had finished a decent MMU out the door within 2-3 years after the 68000, the whole history of computing could have been different.)

The software could be run in an emulator, if anyone wanted to run that flavor of Unix System V.

Around 1990 we (students) inherited a bunch of these. I remember they were pretty slow for the time, and I think the compiler was K&R only...

The terminal was pretty nice, I mean the keyboard had a nice feel. I think it deviated from ANSI in some weird ways, it needed its own termcap entry... ah yes, pt1500 I think- 26 rows!

    pt|pt1500|gt|t0|Convergent Technologies PT:\
 :ae=\17:al=\E[1L:am:as=\16:bs:\
 :cd=\E[0J:ce=\E[0K:cl=\E[2J\E[1;1H:cm=\E[%i%2;%2H:co#80:\
 :dc=\E[1P:dl=\E[1M:do=\E[1B:ei=:ho=\E[1;1H:\
 :ic=\E[1@:im=:kb=\10:kd=\E[B:kl=\E[D:kr=\E[C:ku=\E[A:li#26:\
 :k0=\EOY:k1=\EOP:k2=\EOQ:k3=\EOR:k4=\EOS:\
 :k5=\EOT:k6=\EOU:k7=\EOV:k8=\EOW:k9=\EOX:\
 :nd=\E[C:se=\E[m:sf=\E[1S:sr=\E[1T:so=\E[7m:ue=\E[m:up=\E[A:us=\E[4m:

Here is one on eBay: https://www.ebay.com/itm/125308811771?hash=item1d2cfcb9fb:g:...

I sent this guy my old Convergent NGen hardware, and he revived it! Even sent me some of my old code off the disk drives - he's a really nice guy with lots of tricks up his sleeve. Replaced hard drive head bumpers etc. He 3D printed some parts to revive a QIC (Quarter Inch Tape) drive. That video is on his site too!

4:40 points out the serial ports. It is interesting how serial is still a valid mode of communication nowadays...(like every microcontroller and almost every desktop motherboard still has some serial port), so could still talk directly to this.

This guy did a really good job videoing/presenting this.

I'm not a fan of how he keeps swapping out parts that could be restored with emulated modern replicas that perform the same like the fans and the drives. If he's doing that why not just emulate the whole computer?

Why?