VOGONS


First post, by drewking12

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So I recently picked up this Stratagy 486 and it’s apparently a phone box / answering machine. I thought it was really interesting but the problem is I am way out of my element and unsure how to work it. It boots to the screen in the photos below and I can’t bring up anything besides this password screen. I do apparently have the password however it looks like I can’t type anything in. If anybody knows anything about this or how to work it I would greatly appreciate the input.

Reply 1 of 2, by DaveDDS

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A company I did some work for had an "AASTRA" VOIP PBX that they decided to decomission so I brought it home.

You can see it here: Re: Using XT-IDE on 386 with Compact Flash larger than 512MB - My tests.

Turned out its' built on a "PC compatible chassis" which ran XP internally. Perhaps your PBX is set up in a similar fashion.

Although the're normally never used, it has Ps2 keyboard/mouse ports and a VGA output (If no Ps2 ... perhaps USB might work on yours?)

If you connect a monitor and keybaord, you can actually see it boot and that it has a BIOS you can enter.

It had an internal proprietary 1-2G flash card, but underneath that was an CF socket. There was no obvious way to "install" an OS, but turns out it did recognize and boot from a USB floppy drive (maybe a bootable stick would have worked as well - I never tried).

I put a CF card in it and was able to installed DOS booted from floppy. I was able to find a packet driver that works with the built in network interface.
The BIOS does recognize USB sticks and presents them to DOS as hard drives.

So it has become a fairly useful little super-quiet DOS system (no fans or spinning rust).

Hopefully you can make use of yours in a similar way!

- Dave ; https://dunfield.themindfactory.com ; "Daves Old Computers" ; SW dev addict best known:
ImageDisk: rd/wr ANY floppy PChardware can ; Micro-C: compiler for DOS+ManySmallCPU ; DDLINK: simple/small FileTrans(w/o netSW)via Lan/Lpt/Serial

Reply 2 of 2, by rasz_pl

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Nice. Looks like Stratagy is a Toshiba brand.
Some earlier models 4/6/24 http://pdf.textfiles.com/manuals/TELECOM-S-Z/ … nt%20Manual.pdf were normal PCs with a bunch of two port modem ISA cards. Yours seem to have 4 ports integrated right on the mobo, this suggests they made it more of an embedded system / less a PC.

Can you take some pictures of insides?

https://github.com/raszpl/sigrok-disk FM/MFM/RLL decoder
https://github.com/raszpl/FIC-486-GAC-2-Cache-Module (AT&T Globalyst)
https://github.com/raszpl/386RC-16 ram board
https://github.com/raszpl/440BX Reference Design adapted to Kicad