Glad to help SYS3 & (jr.) Audichron revival

[Sigmaz]

I'm going to post this here so I can share a record of any progress and learning I pick up while working on this rare and incredible device.

In cooperation with the wizard behind the curtain at MADhouseTelephone I am taking on this project to bring this System3 Jr. online and learn from it so I may revive another full bodied System 3.



So far this little guy has been a challenge to even get going one issue was that the fuses were not installed so I needed to make a temporary shunt and installed an inline fuse in the power feed.

I also had to employ one of my large project power supplies to feed this bad boy..



The next issue was that the serial port isn't responding, Fortunately that turned out to be a loose connection.

Once all that was figured out I was pleased to find the HDD spinning up and the system booting in to it's login prompt.



Before any work was to be done I wanted to check to see what installed software options were present and back up anything I could prior to any poking around.



I made my way out to the database options menu and selected to back up anything I could..
The device threw an error saying that it couldn't mount device 4 ( the FDD )

I thought maybe it was a formatting issue so I asked it to format the disk.. again another error.. then I noticed the FDD wasn't spinning..
Pulled the drive from the chassis and cleared a lump of dustbunny and spider carcasses from the motor, Finally spinning.

After attempting to format the the only floppy disk I could find I came to the conclusion that either the drive doesnt like working with an high density disk as it is a 2D drive or there was a combination of possibilities that the drive or disk was bad..
Anyway I cant pull a backup yet.

What I will be doing is installing a Floppy Disk Emulator device and working with everything via USB thumb drive.



This will make managing floppy images simpler and also more reliable than the 30 year old media that Id have to purchase to get the job done.

Another point of concern is the ancient SCSI drives in these machines. To lose the ability to enjoy these devices because of a HDD failure (which will happen) would be a shame.

To eliminate that possibility the game plan there is to image the drive and then place it into carefully protected storage should it ever need to be accessed again

Then the image obtained will be written to an SD card and interfaced into the SYSTEM3 through the services of a highly useful but mostly unknown SCSI 2 SD adaptor.



It's pretty cool how the messages are put together on the fly from the configurations..



That's what I've got so far..
Bringing a couple of  Audichrons to life is a pretty big task wrought with burdening responsibility but it'll be a fun challenge.

I appreciate having been offered the opportunity to help with such an important device.

more to come...

[jsowers]

I always find old computer technology fascinating. At work I got all the old stuff to work on (I'm retired from a school system IT dept.) because I had been there the longest and saved everything. I mostly worked on file servers and we had our share of SCSI hard drives. When they get old, they get very squirrely, so caution is the name of the game. I had one huge old IBM server with three different RAID arrays and it was always losing a SCSI drive. I had a hard time keeping a spare in stock. I shudder to think how it would have totally failed had those drives not been redundant.

I never had a chance to work with those emulator things you mention. It was tough enough just getting the tape backups to work regularly in those servers.

Good luck keeping the Audichron going. Does it have the voice of Jane Barbe on it, or have you gotten that far? You are wise to try and offload to something solid state because floppies and SCSI hard drives are just not dependable at this advanced age. Computers age about like dogs and cats, so past 20 you are on borrowed time.

[Sigmaz]

I haven't heard the unit speak for itself yet. It's my understanding that the vocabulary and messages are the work of Pat Fleet.
I will be trying to connect it to a channel bank soon and will be sending it some key tones to see what I can conjure up.

I called it an Audichron because the company says "Audichron Intelligent Information Systems" on the manuals. Im sure they just brought that out to repurpose the familiar name.
This unit is actually an ETC System 3 Jr. and it's far more capable than the time and temp audichrons found in it's family tree.

The actual company history and lineage is best explained by ADavid. I'm in no way versed well enough on this info.

This is a full blown call intercept machine.   
But sure, I'd bet it'll still tell you the time and temperature.

[HarrySmith]

That is Very Cool! I like it! There is one functioning unit up & running somewhere. I forget who has it but I will try to search for it. Thanks for taking the time to reanimate this dinosaur! It's great that you have a way to fool it into thinking it is running from floppies & scuzzies, saving the original stuff is key!

[MADhouseTelephone]

These were not designed to tell time and temp. However, based on the CID that came in with the call, it could repeat your number back to you, or tell you that the number you called had been changed and read you the new number. It has a T1 interface, so it could do this on 24 calls simultaneously!

[MADhouseTelephone]

Just so you know: those sound files I sent you came off of that machine.  ADavid

[Sigmaz]

Thats right, I do remember you telling me that.

[MADhouseTelephone]

Any progress to report? My board came in from China finally. Hopefully one of these days I can find time to play with my Sys3.

[MADhouseTelephone]

I have the adapter now. Could you copy the files onto a SD card from the drive I sent you, and send it to me?

[Monarke4]

I'm working on a Audichron Z-10.  After spending some time over a few days I realized (and someone pointed out) that the documents I was looking for were all the time.

I'm curious, did you download all of the available documents for the System 3?

http://support.etcia.net/

'Audichron System 3' is available from the pull-down menu to the left of the page.