Acquired a Surviving Lilith!

[1933y]

Found at a garage sale in SoCal. Came with a spare power supply assembly, and original keyboard/mouse. I think a disk cartridge is in the drive. No original monitor unfortunately. I have experience with old computers, but this will be my biggest project yet. I need help. I have not tried powering it on, and will not until I am sure nothing will be damaged. Is there anyone else with a surviving unit? What can I do about adapting the video signal from the seemingly proprietary DIN connector? The hard drive? There are lots of unknowns. Are there any other surviving Lilith computers in the US?

 

[Al Kossow]

Lilith | X1051.91 | Computer History Museum

www.computerhistory.org

 

[fritzeflink]

Is it this ?

Photos and videos Lilith – Pascal for small machines

pascal.hansotten.com

 

[1933y]

Is it this ?

Photos and videos Lilith – Pascal for small machines

pascal.hansotten.com

Yup, just housed in a different case. Also, my mouse is red.

 

[cullyrichard]

View attachment 1283568

Found at a garage sale in SoCal. Came with a spare power supply assembly, and original keyboard/mouse. I think a disk cartridge is in the drive. No original monitor unfortunately. I have experience with old computers, but this will be my biggest project yet. I need help. I have not tried powering it on, and will not until I am sure nothing will be damaged. Is there anyone else with a surviving unit? What can I do about adapting the video signal from the seemingly proprietary DIN connector? The hard drive? There are lots of unknowns. Are there any other surviving Lilith computers in the US?

Congratulations on a great find!

If you can work out the video pinout and vsync / hsync frequencies, something like an RGB2HDMI may make it possible to get a temporary display while you find a monitor that will work. I was planning to do this with a wang PC until I located the monitor . This is a very exciting find and I look forward to seeing how you progress with it! I’m happy to help, as I’ve worked on several machines from the era, however, this one is entirely new to me so there will be a learning curve for sure.

What hard drive does it have? I wonder if it would it be possible to spin it up on an interface to a PC first to take an image before spinning it up on the real machine

 

[1933y]

Congratulations on a great find!

If you can work out the video pinout and vsync / hsync frequencies, something like an RGB2HDMI may make it possible to get a temporary display while you find a monitor that will work. I was planning to do this with a wang PC until I located the monitor . This is a very exciting find and I look forward to seeing how you progress with it! I’m happy to help, as I’ve worked on several machines from the era, however, this one is entirely new to me so there will be a learning curve for sure.

What hard drive does it have? I wonder if it would it be possible to spin it up on an interface to a PC first to take an image before spinning it up on the real machine

I'm grateful for your advice. Unfortunately, there will likely be no way to power up the drive and interface it with any other machine. This uses a honeywell mididisk drive, which as I understand was only used on honeywell mainframes and Lilith workstations. Ill keep updating this thread with updates on this project. I found one other person on this forum who owns a Lilith, but I'm unable to DM since my account is too new. Hopefully I can eventually reach out. This community will be a great asset to draw knowledge from.

 

[jdreesen]

Wow, just wow....at a garage sale no less.....These things make Apple-1's look abundent. At least one person in the US has another. The true developer of the Lilith lives in the US (Utah) but has no interest in these anymore.

Yes, I have one, it was operational until ca. 2015. Yours is a first generation Lilith with a Honeywell-Bull 10Mb cartridge diskdrive.
Please post pictures of the PCB cage and I can tell you if it is complete.

Do NOT switch on until you disconnect the cardridge from the powersupply. It needs servicing. No when, no if's...
This is the cartridge diskdrive https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/the-cii-honeywell-bull-d120-mididisk.1242747/
It is possible to remove the cartridge by defeating a simple interlock on the drive's left hand side.
The drive is one of the first with embedded servo-information, the head assembly will be sticky by now, and the Lilith writes to the cartridge as part of the booting process.
Result will be a cartridge with destroyed servo-tracks, which cannot be reformatted....The interface is not compatible with anything else either.
I have internal communication from the ETH that shows that at the time they were not to pleased with them either....
Later generation Lilith's use a more standard 15MB MFM diskdrive (IMI5018) Incidentally ALL INI5018 I recovered were 100% OK with no bad blocks !

The monitor is a Ball WD17. Slow phospor and proprietary scan-rates.... These were used on some other machines at the time, but are nevertheless very rare themselves.
Good news is that you can change a few jumpers and use a PAL-rate monitor ( at a restricted resolution of course.)

More good news : I created an emulator for the Lilith, called Emulith. It gives you a very good idea of the running machine. Google for it ...

And even more good news : I recently created a debugging unit for these, see :

https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/eth-lilith-dpu-board-remake.1237066/#post-1310833

This debugger has been proved working and will help you get yours operational. The IDE interface however does not yet work.....


The ETH has put theirs in their museum :

https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/eth-lilith-and-ceres-pictures-from-the-eth.1234209/

And dumped some CRT monitors, not realising I neede these badly. Which they should have been aware of, as I recovered the contents of their remaining Lilith cartridghes beforehand.

Looking forward to your progres......

Jos

 

[1933y]

Just FIY for everyone, since I'm a new member all my messages have to be approved by a moderator. Because of this, my responses might be delayed and out of order.

 

[1933y]

Wow, just wow....at a garage sale no less.....These things make Apple-1's look abundent. At least one person in the US has another. The true developer of the Lilith lives in the US (Utah) but has no interest in these anymore.

Yes, I have one, it was operational until ca. 2015. Yours is a first generation Lilith with a Honeywell-Bull 10Mb cartridge diskdrive.
Please post pictures of the PCB cage and I can tell you if it is complete.

Do NOT switch on until you disconnect the cardridge from the powersupply. It needs servicing. No when, no if's...
This is the cartridge diskdrive https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/the-cii-honeywell-bull-d120-mididisk.1242747/
It is possible to remove the cartridge by defeating a simple interlock on the drive's left hand side.
The drive is one of the first with embedded servo-information, the R/W assembly will be sticky by now, and the Lilith writes to the cartridge as part of the booting process.
Result will be a cartridge with destroyed servo-tracks, which cannot be reformatted....The interface is not compatible with anything else either.
I have internal communication from the ETH that shows that at the time they were not to pleased with them either....
Later generation Lilith's use a more standard 15MB MFM diskdrive (IMI5018) Incidentally ALL INI5018 I recovered were 100% OK with no bad blocks !

The monitor is a Ball WD17. Slow phospor and proprietary scan-rates.... These were used on some other machines at the time, but are nevertheless very rare themselves.
Good news is that you can change a few jumpers and use a PAL-rate monitor ( at a restricted resolution of course.)

More good news : I created an emulator for the Lilith, called Emulith. It gives you a very good idea of the running machine. Google for it ...

And even more good news : I recently created a debugging unit for these, see :

https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/eth-lilith-dpu-board-remake.1237066/#post-1310833

These debugger has been proved working and will help you get yours operational. The IDE interface however does not yet work.....


The ETH has put theirs in their museum :

https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/eth-lilith-and-ceres-pictures-from-the-eth.1234209/

And dumped some CRT monitors, not realising I neede these badly. Which they should have been aware of, as I recovered the contents of their remaining Lilith cartridghes beforehand.

Looking forward to your progres......

Thanks a ton for the info. It's good to hear that you have done so much for such a small community of owners. I will continue to update with pictures and other info about my particular unit. I'll start at the PSU of this unit, as I have a spare unit which I can bench test. That way, the PSU can be tested without having to risk the system. Since I'm in the US, it'll take a bit for me to procure a PAL monitor. What would be the necessary requirements to make the video modifications? While doing this particular mod is far in the future repairs, I can't find any information about it, and so I am curious about how it's done. Attached is a picture of the card cage, which I hope is complete. All cards on basic visual inspection appear to be in fair condition.

 

[jdreesen]

Some more tidbits :

- it clearly shows that the Lilith was modelled after the Alto.....
- a 32-bit successor, called Eve, was made. ANY info on this is very welcome...
- an experimental single-chip Lilith processor was made. A critical bug was never corrected.

- the normal hi-res display is a repackaged Ball S-17-1042-HD unit.

- the keyboard is a Keytronics unit and will need replacement of the foam pads. Take care as all I/O is connected via identical DB25 connectors. The IO interface DB25, next to the Keyboard DB25, carries the +12V powerline, where the same place on the KBD is +5V. No prizes for guessing how I found out....

- the HB120 has a somewhat Diablo-like interface, fixed to 392 cylinders, 2 heads, 50 128-bytes sectors. ( of which the Lilith uses 48, 2 sectors / track set aside for bad track recovery)
- while the Lilith does not support it, it is possible to write-protect the cartridges. Do so to protect the cartridges until you know fore sure the drive is OK. Read the drive manual for info.
- and remove the cartridge from you drive. It should be black, not white. You might have the dummy dustprotection cartridge.....

- other occurences of the HB120 drive besides Honeywell-Bull themselves and the Lilith :
- The Datapoint 9810 is a HB120 : http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/datapoint/out-think_newsletter/Out-Think_19800900_26.pdf
- Baydel equipped some QBUS PDP11's with the HB120

- Booting : at boottime the microcode awaits for keyboard input : "space" for normal boot, "ctrl-A" for rescue-boot. Then the bootfile is read from the disk. Therefore nothing will be seen on the screen unless both keyboard and disk are OK.

- The Lilith supports Ethernet, but only the original 3Mb with an 8-bit IP address ( set by a dipswitch....)

- Full documentation, including the official schematics, is available on Bitsavers. The schematics I made when I acquired the unit are appended here. These can be helpfull as they contain different bugs than the originals set of schematics..... and it's a .zip, not .txt...

- Version-2 Liliths support more memory (up to 2MB) and have a WD1001-based controller for an IMI-5018 MFM harddisk. They need different microcode proms though.

- I know of about 20 surviving units.

 

[jdreesen]

Attached is a picture of the card cage, which I hope is complete.

That is indeed a complete setup for a basic Lilith. You don't have the optional laserprinter interface or Ethernet card. The cards have fixed locations as you can see.
That is also valid for the RAM-boards ! They may share the same PCB, but are populated differently, and should not be interchanged.

Using a different display involves setting a different bitmap starting address ( 2 Dipswitches on the display board ) and changing the contents of the H- and V- timing Eproms on the display board.

 

[daver2]

Nice find, and welcome to VCFED.

Dave

 

[cullyrichard]

I'm grateful for your advice. Unfortunately, there will likely be no way to power up the drive and interface it with any other machine. This uses a honeywell mididisk drive, which as I understand was only used on honeywell mainframes and Lilith workstations. Ill keep updating this thread with updates on this project. I found one other person on this forum who owns a Lilith, but I'm unable to DM since my account is too new. Hopefully I can eventually reach out. This community will be a great asset to draw knowledge from.

Absolutely! I can send you a DM but I suppose you can't send me one first. I sent you one just now so we can stay in touch. I'm very excited for your progress!

I did some reading on the mididisk (D120) drive. For that particular drive the interface is custom, however very straightforward. You supply the drive with 8 address lines. These lines, along with two strobe lines select the platter and track of the drive. There are some timing nuances with this selection process. The other control lines are read/write enable, write data, run, fault reset, initialize and then two for power supply and power on. I'm not sure of the interface for the last two but I will do some more reading.

The disk drive outputs, in return a bit clock, the data from the selected track, sector mark, index mark and other status and position lines.

cii honeywell bull :: D120 Mididisk Drive Product Specification Sep78 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

From the bitsavers.org collection, a scanned-in computer-related document.cii honeywell bull :: D120 Mididisk Drive Product Specification Sep78

archive.org

I would think that even a modest microcontroller could serve as an interface to this drive to write some form of backup, I will have to do some thinking and research but it may be a worthwhile endeavor to preserve your data. furthermore, an emulator, based on my 15 minutes of reading, does not appear to be complex.

I've started mocking up some code for a RP2040 based interface to help understand how an interface may work. This will take me a bit as I've been writing a lot of python and the syntax differences are definitely causing me some trouble!

 

[1933y]

You might have the dummy dustprotection cartridge.....

This is indeed the case. Frankly I consider myself lucky that the system isn't missing more tha it already is. It is also a blessing that you have managed to archive critical information about the OS. While a significant challenge, this issue isn't necessarily insurmountable given the incredible work by you, and modern technology which has the possibility to emulate these failing drives.

 

[1933y]

Absolutely! I can send you a DM but I suppose you can't send me one first. I sent you one just now so we can stay in touch. I'm very excited for your progress!

I did some reading on the mididisk (D120) drive. For that particular drive the interface is custom, however very straightforward. You supply the drive with 8 address lines. These lines, along with two strobe lines select the platter and track of the drive. There are some timing nuances with this selection process. The other control lines are read/write enable, write data, run, fault reset, initialize and then two for power supply and power on. I'm not sure of the interface for the last two but I will do some more reading.

The disk drive outputs, in return a bit clock, the data from the selected track, sector mark, index mark and other status and position lines.

cii honeywell bull :: D120 Mididisk Drive Product Specification Sep78 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

From the bitsavers.org collection, a scanned-in computer-related document.cii honeywell bull :: D120 Mididisk Drive Product Specification Sep78

archive.org

I would think that even a modest microcontroller could serve as an interface to this drive to write some form of backup, I will have to do some thinking and research but it may be a worthwhile endeavor to preserve your data. furthermore, an emulator, based on my 15 minutes of reading, does not appear to be complex.

I've started mocking up some code for a RP2040 based interface to help understand how an interface may work. This will take me a bit as I've been writing a lot of python and the syntax differences are definitely causing me some trouble!

Thank you for reaching out! I have recieved DMs from both you and user jdreesen, and am thankful for both of your incredible help. Your suggestion on emulation of the drive interface with a microcontroller resonates strongly with me, given that similar projects have had success in the past. Given that my unit is missing the original hard disk cartridge, this work will be essential in the project. Jdreesen's emulator program will also be a huge asset in this endeavor. I too am familiar with basic microcontrollers, although never have I created anything to the scale of emulating a drive. Your expertise is greatly appreciated!

 

[jdreesen]

So, in short : no display, no disk. Nevertheless we'll get her running !

Tasks on hand :

- return to where you bought the Lilith and ask for the cartridges. Rather soonish, because people probably don't recognize it as belonging to the Lilith and will be prone to toss them out.
You will not find disks otherwise. More disk pics here https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/the-cii-honeywell-bull-d120-mididisk.1242747/

- Yours is a very early Lilith and might already be setup for the PAL 4:3 display. The one in CHM certainly is.
To check you will need to provide a pic of the dipswitches and dump the contents of both 2716 timing eproms on the videoboard.

- cullyrichard suggestion of emulating the drive is useful, but much too complicated IMHO.
Rather than emulating the diskdrive you should emulate the combo diskdrive & Lilith controller. That way you do not have to deal with serializing and deserializing the data, or having to provide CRC's.
Look to what the LIlith is expecting, which is 784x50 sectors of 128 words each and emulatate just that. Check the emulator source io_MD120.c to see what is needed.
You could map that easily on a 32MB compactflash for instance.

 

[1933y]

Small updates:

Unfortunately, the disks are long gone. I checked for additional items for the Lilith, but all that's left are some CoCo peripherals. I did pick up a box of cables though, on the off chance that they might be necessary. It must be noted that the machine was not sold by the likely original owner, or their relatives. This Lilith was bought from a Hispanic couple who owned a landscaping business. Their english wasn't perfect, but good enough to where I could learn what they knew about it. It was obtained from a landscaping job in a wealthy area near where I live, apparently basement stored for years. Why this couple picked it up is a mystery to me, given they clearly had no idea what it was, but it's a stroke of luck they did and sold it to me. (As a side note, the only details I knew going in was that it was a "vintage technology system"). I did manage to compare an old photo they had (seemingly during a time this machine was stored outside) with the example on the CHM website, and I can confirm that the monitors look exactly the same. Shame it was separated before it made it into my hands, but this extra info might help with identifying which display interface my machine is set up for. Now, I need to read the eeproms. Can anyone identify the make of the eeproms visible on the boards?

Attached are additional photos. These include shots of the CPU and DSP boards. The Lilith has now had a basic cleaning, and has been moved from a garage to my little work area.

 

[seaken]

Welcome to the forum @1933y. I used to get some good stuff at garage sales but it's been several years since I've found old computer systems at garage sales around here. Very cool, nice find!

Seaken

 

[cullyrichard]

So, in short : no display, no disk. Nevertheless we'll get her running !

Tasks on hand :

- return to where you bought the Lilith and ask for the cartridges. Rather soonish, because people probably don't recognize it as belonging to the Lilith and will be prone to toss them out.
You will not find disks otherwise. More disk pics here https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/the-cii-honeywell-bull-d120-mididisk.1242747/

- Yours is a very early Lilith and might already be setup for the PAL 4:3 display. The one in CHM certainly is.
To check you will need to provide a pic of the dipswitches and dump the contents of both 2716 timing eproms on the videoboard.

- cullyrichard suggestion of emulating the drive is useful, but much too complicated IMHO.
Rather than emulating the diskdrive you should emulate the combo diskdrive & Lilith controller. That way you do not have to deal with serializing and deserializing the data, or having to provide CRC's.
Look to what the LIlith is expecting, which is 784x50 sectors of 128 words each and emulatate just that. Check the emulator source io_MD120.c to see what is needed.
You could map that easily on a 32MB compactflash for instance.

I don’t necessarily feel that it’s too complex for a modern, advanced microcontroller to handle the serialization and deserialization. I think it’s preferable to just emulate the entire card though. The possibilities are greatly expanded, and it’s likely to be faster and a much much cleaner method, absolutely the right way to go. If I can dig up a spec I’ll start writing up an emulator that does it this way

 

[jdreesen]

I am sure a modern microcontroller can handle that easily, and probably the whole Lilith at that, it is just less hassle to emulate the disk+controller than just the disk. Read the appropiate section of my emulator. Make sure you also understand how it handles interrupts, it is quite unique...