Working Tektronix 6130, minimal UTek 2.3 OS

[smj]

I landed a Tektronix 6130 earlier this year, one of a few NS32000-based workstations Tektronix offered in the 1980s. I was very surprised and pleased to discover that it was able to boot from the ancient Micropolis 1302 hard drive inside. No expansion cards, and the UTek installation has been brutally stripped down to under 8MB on disk. No compiler, lots of empty directories in /usr, etc.

But it runs, and exercises the hardware, and runs diags. So I've got an image of that Micropolis 1302 and the EPROM images online here. If you come across a 6130 and have an MFM Emulator by David Gesswein, you may be able to use that image to evaluate the system.

 

[stepleton]

As a Whitechapel MG-1 haver and appreciator of Tektronix computers, I salute my fellow NS32K weirdo. Is there an also-ran architecture that Tektronix didn't use? I know they had an 88000-based machine and I'm half expecting to find a Fairchild Clipper-based system one day. What do you use as the display?

 

[smj]

Funny, I was about to mention a console issue. Sadly, I don't have the default Tek 4105 terminal for the console. And despite having what appears to be a well-stocked /etc/termcap file, I have had to set my VT510 to Televideo 925 emulation and set my terminal type to tvi925 during login in order to get sensible console behavior. Various DEC terminal types just wouldn't behave properly.

Oh, and another catch - the console port on my unit is Serial Port 1; Serial Port 0 only comes into play if the system fails to boot, at which point invokes a PROM monitor on Port 0 and Port 1 stops responding. IIRC the Tek 4132 labels serial port 0 as the console port in the silkscreen, but not the 61x0.

The other thing I thought I should include is a better identifier for the UTek OS. Somebody asked what version I have, and I remembered there were some minor identifiers that could be important or at least informative.

Here's what I take to be the kernel identifier from booting up:

Tektronix - UTek STRATOSW2.3 #2.125 Thu Oct 23 15:40:46 PDT 1986

And here's the uname -a output:

# uname -a
UTek tek6130 W2.3 2.3E Tek6100