tektronix 4404

[Elektraglide]

Hi,
I'm trying to get a Tektronix 4404 AI workstation (eat your heart out chatGPT) running again. 68010 8MHz, 2MB, 40MB disk.

The Micropolis 1304 HD seem to be notorious for dying / not spinning up.
The CPU part seems fine, I'mn restoring the keyboard (capacitance keyboard foam has turned to dust), and hope to get the 1304 seeking..

Anyone have any software for this thing? I have quite a lot of floppies for it, but always after other sources. Advice / Links always welcome!

Adam

 

[legalize]

Have you archived your floppies and uploaded them somewhere?

 

[Elektraglide]

No still just boxes of floppies. Whats the recommended method for archiving? I see some flux raw data reading dongles around - any good?

 

[Elektraglide]

Got a working Tek4404 up and running now. Did a little write-up here: https://medium.com/@adambillyard/restoring-an-ai-workstation-from-40-year-ago-125abb5c89b4
I see archives of individual floppies. Is there an archive for whole HD images?

 

[bear]

I imagine bitsavers would take it. Floppy images too. If they're like the 6130, they're just "regular" PC style DSDD 9sec/trk (360KB) format, and, e.g. linux dd would suffice to image them.

edit: I see you determined them to be 8sec/trk. odd. still a "regular" PC style format (320KB) but I'm less sure of linux coping. Solaris x86 definitely wouldn't.

edit2: I had a lot of problems writing emulated disks with my mfmulator until I changed the linux default i/o scheduler to noop. there are good reasons to do this even if it doesn't solve your specific problem with the 4404 emulation. also the adaptec is a scsi bridge, I'd imagine you could attach a normal scsi disk directly to the 4404 and forgo the bridge/mfmulator entirely. I haven't tried with my 4406 (which currently has bigger problems) yet, though.

 

[daver2]

First of all (as these are your first posts) welcome to VCFED.

What an interesting machine. Never seen one of those before!

@nikola-wan is the Tek guru...

Dave

 

[tradde]

Welcome. I also have never seen one of these. Very nice looking machine.

 

[Elektraglide]

I had forgotten just how noddy K&R C compilers are! Trying to get MicroEmacs compiling is proving fun! After that I really need to get a bash or ksh built for this as the built-in shell command is driving me crazy.

Q: Soo. I am super happy I've got it going and all. But what do folks DO with these machines once they're all going?

 

[smj]

Q: Soo. I am super happy I've got it going and all. But what do folks DO with these machines once they're all going?

Typically, they look for a place where they can ask what they can do with them now that they're running.

This may happen before or after spending a lot of time searching with various combinations of keywords, trying to find any hardware or software for them. I'm in this stage regarding a Tektronix 6130 right now. But the tiny OS installation doesn't even include the noddy K&R C compiler...

 

[Elektraglide]

Little update on my journey. I've written a dhcp client and a simple window manager for the tek4404. Here is a short video of it rocking its stuff!

 

[Elektraglide]

Behold, uemacs compiled and running in my noddy window system on the Tektronix 4404. Woot!

 

[stefan-lokeldarn]

Hardcore x11 programming !

Or is it X11 at all ?

 

[Elektraglide]

Hardcore x11 programming !

Or is it X11 at all ?

Not at all. It written from scratch in C by me! Code here: https://github.com/Elektraglide/tek4404/tree/main/wmgr

 

[Elektraglide]

Having watched the youtube on the restored Xerox Alto and Star workstations, I spent the morning reworking the styling of the windows which look a little less brutal. Think it looks halfway decent now!

In the meantime I've written a replacement shell (called ash) which uses 44k of RAM rather than 360K of RAM for the standard shell.