Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

Anybody on the board have direct experience with Intergraph Clipper workstations?

I have recently acquired one which is being contrary, and it'd be nice if there were somebody I could chat with about what it OUGHT to be doing. Basically it's switching on, but otherwise showing no further sign of life. It's possible I have something hooked up wrong, I suppose. I briefly had the monitor in sync with no picture, but now I can't even get that much (it may have been a fluke to begin with).

FWIW it's a 2700-series.

Yes, I've got many years of experience with Intergraph systems.


I'm still using an Interpro 125 as bedside table and it's doing it's job admirably. other than that it's complete rubbish, I have the disks to re-install the system but when loading the OS it goes into screensaver mode and just stays there. Never was able to solve that.

2700 series should be a nice machine with the latest Clipper processor, I used to have a couple 2200-series machines with all documentation. I think the last one was sold to some guy in Spain. IIRC you need a special keyboard and mouse, monitor should be pretty standard. The system should show a ROM menu when powered on, even without OS installed. What kind of video output does your system have? I think mine was 13W3 but with a non-standard layout. I used to have a 20" monitor with metal casing (bullet-proof?) which weighed about a ton. I kept that with the system, so it probably didn't work with a standard monitor. Good old days

Okay, that's good to know.

What do you know about the monitor requirements and connector pinout? It has a 13W3 and the source I found suggests it's separate (composite H/V) sync, with the same pinout as a Sun. But I have no reason to believe this is necessarily accurate. I have another (older) 2000-series on its way, that looks like it has a 5W5 video connector, which I've never seen anything similar to before, but suggests it may use separate H and V sync, in which case I'm not going to get anywhere with the Sun cable.

Is there a way to get it to respond on a serial port? That would tell me at least a little until I work out the video signal requirements. My initial attempts got nothing, and I'm not entirely sure I didn't dork something up while I was sucking dust out of it (it was really bad).

I have the keyboard and mouse (and a tablet), so that's not a problem.

I think that you could get a pretty good feel for how sync is being handled by throwing a scope on the output if it idles at a PROM menu. You probably wouldn't be able to separate R G and B, but you could see where H and V were, and whether or not they were mixed.

probably... if I had a 'scope, and any indication the system was getting far enough to show the PROM menu.

kjaer wrote: probably... if I had a 'scope, and any indication the system was getting far enough to show the PROM menu.

If you need one I have one and am semi-local.

I just did a quick inspection of the framebuffer board artwork - looks like the 13W3 is wired with (at least) pins 2, 4, and 5 (in addition to A1, A2, and A3) which, if they are carrying separate H and V sync, should be feasible for successful combinatoric testing. I'll have to think about how to come up with a convenient test rig for it, though. Perhaps if I stare at the Fry's parts shelves for long enough, something will become apparent.

The fact that pins 2, 4, and 5 are wired at all strongly suggests my information about the Intergraph 13W3 pinout is bad (or at least not applicable to a machine of this vintage).

My guess was correct. The 13W3 is wired with separate sync. Here's the pinout -

2 - V
4 - Gnd
5 - H

This doesn't match any other vendor's pinout I'm aware of. A1, A2, and A3 (R, G, and B) seem to match the Sun layout. I am basing this on the (correct) blue bootloader screen that came up. The X desktop only came up with black, white, and grey, and I didn't do much to explore other than to verify things are more or less in order. I got lucky and the root password was blank. There seems to be some app software installed, so I will want to back that up sooner rather than later, and the software license files (if I can find them).

The power-on process seems to go like this:

1. keyboard beep (immediate)
2. RS232 handshake (DSR, RTS, CTS) lines asserted (you can see this with an LED test block on the serial port, they'll go from red to green)
3. keyboard beep
4. display test pattern (brief)
5. display clear
6. console displays self-test results

The second step should happen within a couple of seconds; the third after maybe 10 or 15 seconds. My system appears to be having a problem where it will only progress past step 1 if it's been sitting powered off for many hours. Now that I've got the display wired correctly it ran fine for ten or fifteen minutes before I shut it down, then failed to come up at all the second time. It was doing this before I had the display wired correctly (made it difficult to troubleshoot!) but I didn't know if something was happening on the display that I just couldn't see, or what. As it turns out it's like the CPU never exits reset; it does the exact same thing if the processor and memory modules are removed. The CPU also gets very, very hot when this happens - much hotter than it does when the system runs normally. I have no idea what the problem might be. If it gets past step three, it seems to run fine, possibly for as long as I like. But if I shut it off, however briefly, it needs to sit for >6 hours before it will self-test again.

Also - the second machine arrived this afternoon. It seems to be an InterPro 2020 (C300), and I will need to find a source for the DB5W5 cable it needs to attach a monitor. Looks like it takes 30 pin SIMMs. Good thing SAQ left me with a pile of them. Possibly I could use some more...

kjaer wrote: Looks like it takes 30 pin SIMMs. Good thing SAQ left me with a pile of them. Possibly I could use some more...

1GB worth? 2GB worth? Don't think I still have 4GB - quite - but there are a lot.

Just found a couple of things while cleaning up a bit. Looks like I still have a complete(?) set of installation CD's. There should be documentation on them, but when I browse the disk I can only see installable program files so it's probably only useable if you already have a system running.

Bought an Intergraph InterPro 2000 from eBay - only a workstation. Since it's using proprietary mouse,keyboard and strange rgb connector, obviously I will have to use serial console. May be someone has documentation ?

I see keyboards on ebay much more frequently than the machines themselves. This is what it looks like: http://www.ebay.com/itm/141494569306

There's not much in the way of documentation. Here's the project notes from my IP2020. http://typewritten.org/Projects/Intergraph/h0jhvb.html

Thanks, I need to find a keyboard/mouse within EU.
I'm thinking to combine these cables for the monitor:

That'll work. The cable I made has 5 BNC on the other end, not a VGA connector like the project notes.

Do you have RS232 port pinout schema?

kokoboi wrote: Do you have RS232 port pinout schema?

The serial port is a 3-in-1 pinout, and not the same layout as the HP 9000/400 layout. I have the breakout cable here, and will try to investigate the wiring and report it.

In my experience before I got the breakout cable, the wiring was good enough to let a regular DB25 cable get the first port's output, but I could not input anything. But it could have been human error or a subtle flow control problem on my side.

I found the serial pinout schema and made a working 5w5 <-> vga cable.
Now I'm searching the pinout for the Intergraph's proprietary FTIS1660XX keyboard and mouse.