Hi All!
I am about to dig into this subject; found a seller with a lots of DGC Nova boards, almost everything including CPU, core memory, io boards, serials ports etc.
But no backplane neither no casing, power supplies, peripherals etc - everything that is needed to make a bunch of cards into a working machine.
I admit that Nova is a hard thing: a cousin of PDP-11 but without such excessive documentation, user base and restoration and maintenance experience.
Service manuals with circuitry, diagrams, part numbers etc are just absent in public.
In addition, I'm in Russia, where Novas are a real exotic, unlike DEC minis and IBM 360/370 reimplementation.
Nevertheless I am about to buy whatever I can afford, since this ancestry does worth to be saved for the future. And who knows maybe it will work some day...
After a quick and then thorough search it appears that there are only a few resources about Novas; some manuals on bitsavers (although user-style "how to unpack and power on; also our dialect of Fortran" manuals mostly).
Search on this forum also highlights only a single theme.
Well, the goal of this post is to find out
- are there success stories in Nova revival? How many machines are alive in the good and careful arms of hobbyists?
- known pitfalls (where to start from; what is to avoid, etc)
- search theme for manuals, dumps, circuit diagrams
- make a replica? earlier Novas are squarish without fancy toggles, case may be re-implemented; backplane, connectors and power are the challenges
- here you can share your experience.
Sincerely yours, appreciate your help
Ivan
I am about to dig into this subject; found a seller with a lots of DGC Nova boards, almost everything including CPU, core memory, io boards, serials ports etc.
But no backplane neither no casing, power supplies, peripherals etc - everything that is needed to make a bunch of cards into a working machine.
I admit that Nova is a hard thing: a cousin of PDP-11 but without such excessive documentation, user base and restoration and maintenance experience.
Service manuals with circuitry, diagrams, part numbers etc are just absent in public.
In addition, I'm in Russia, where Novas are a real exotic, unlike DEC minis and IBM 360/370 reimplementation.
Nevertheless I am about to buy whatever I can afford, since this ancestry does worth to be saved for the future. And who knows maybe it will work some day...
After a quick and then thorough search it appears that there are only a few resources about Novas; some manuals on bitsavers (although user-style "how to unpack and power on; also our dialect of Fortran" manuals mostly).
Search on this forum also highlights only a single theme.
Well, the goal of this post is to find out
- are there success stories in Nova revival? How many machines are alive in the good and careful arms of hobbyists?
- known pitfalls (where to start from; what is to avoid, etc)
- search theme for manuals, dumps, circuit diagrams
- make a replica? earlier Novas are squarish without fancy toggles, case may be re-implemented; backplane, connectors and power are the challenges
- here you can share your experience.
Sincerely yours, appreciate your help
Ivan
