🚀 go-pugleaf

A number of things:

1)  Amount of mail:  Surprisingly, only one person has asked to leave
the list since this lot of mail.  I sorta think this means we are all
old die-hards!

2)  Machine list:  3645 was duplicated.  I suspect the second one was
for the 3670.
I suspect most of us lived through the various flavors of Lispms and so
know them well.  The 36x5 machines had some different CPU boards
(primarily the IFU - Instruction Fetch Unit) but were otherwise the same
as the 36x0 machines.  The IFU also went in the 3600 but it wasn't then
called a 3605.   The 3600,364x,367x all used the same boards (modulo
some differences in the I/O).  The 3600 originally came with a different
video than the later 364x,367x but could be upgraded to the PEV (Phase
Encoded Video).

3)  Upgrade path:  I wouldn't particularly suggest upgrading from 3640
to 3645.  Go to an Ivory of some flavor.  The MacIvory has advantage in
that you aren't dependent on a Symbolics monitor (or did the XLs ever
put out PC-compatible video?)

4)  3640 to console connection:  200 feet is possible, but I'd suggest
100-150.  Also, that cable and the connector would be quite expensive if
you could find them new.  I might have a 200' and/or 100' cable around
(send me private email).  The longer cable tended to cause audio
problems.  If you want to play with it yourself, we made break-out boxes
that went from the cable to more standard connectors, then we ran those
over standard wires/cable, then another box to convert back to the
Hirose cable to plug into the monitor.  I suspect we have those around
too.  You can run this a bit further, as I recall.

5)  3640:  Depending upon the particular disk in your box (There were
two basic kinds of disks in the 3640-class machines), do NOT turn the
machine back on immediately after turning it off.  Give it a couple of
minutes.  A short off-cycle tended to fry the disk.

6)  I certainly was able to use X connections between a Sun and a 3645,
but the last OS I used was Genera 8.1.

7)  Re spare boards:  There are differences in compatibility between
different processor boards depending upon revision level.  Some may not
work well with the wrong revision level of other boards.  Sorry, I've
forgotten the details.  The complications that I'm aware of mainly were
in the IFU board set though.

8) Your machine is most likely to die because of disk failure.  The
oxide will flake off the platter and will cause a head crash.  You're
well past the expected lifetime of the disk.  Even disks that have been
powered-down for many years tend to fail now.  The other thing that
tends to go on these is the power supply.  (Also, you may want to figure
out how to adjust the various voltage levels.  That could cause havoc on
the IFU boards but I don't know how sensitive the non-IFU machines were.)

We got to the point that the only thing on the Symbolics disk was the
world and swap space and a few FEP files.  All data was kept elsewhere. 
 Oh yeah, it was good to have two worlds if you have enough disk space. 
If one gets trashed, you can fall back to the other.   I also broke up
the swap space into multiple fep files so that if one failed, you could
bring up the machine by using the others.


Good luck!

	Mabry Tyson