First post, by drosse1meyer
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Hi Everyone
Some while ago I acquired a large beige Unisys machine and I've finally found the time to dig into it a little bit. I am not really sure if its worth playing around with all too much and would like input before I move onto other projects!
The case outside simply states Unisys but inside label says 'Unisys 800 16/2'... It is built like a tank and probably weighs 40-50 lbs. The front has a power and HD LED and a reset button, rear has serial and parallel connects. There are keylocks on both ends but I was able to figure out how to crack it open. Luckily the case was not locked and i removed them as I had no key.
There is a large motherboard with only 2 mb of soldered RAM and no sockets or slots. It seems unremarkable with dip switches for configuring things such as wait states and memory size. The slots are all ISA with one nonstandard looking connection (perhaps for a memory expansion board?) and onboard serial and parallel headers. PSU is standard AT pinout but L - shaped and way oversized. It gets pretty hot and the fan was annoying so I swapped it out for a smaller psu with adapter.
Two ISA cards, a Headland VGA 512kb and a Sumo SCSI controller. The hard drive is 40 MB SCSI and still works nicely after a little refurbishment. I was able to install DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 after figuring out some SCSI issues.
The BIOS is wretched and literally just a text menu with hardly any options. Perhaps there was some other method (diskette program)?
Anyway, it runs OK (tested with wolf3d and win3.1)... I looked a bit and can't find much documentation about or for the machine.
Overall a little underwhelming, and I was considering re-using the case for a 486 build and keeping the guts.... Having a working SCSI drive and other cards is a welcome addition, though.
Opinions? Has anyone played with one of these before?
P1: Packard Bell - 233 MMX, Voodoo1, 64 MB, ALS100+
P2-V2: Dell Dimension - 400 Mhz, Voodoo2, 256 MB
P!!! Custom: 1 Ghz, GeForce2 Pro/64MB, 384 MB