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AT&T 3B2

223 E. City Hall Ave. Norfolk, VA 23510
Tom Manos photo

Last weekend, I fired up the 3B2 and was a bit disappointed to find that I have both hard drive and maybe other problems to consider.

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Tom Manos photo

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Today I cleaned up the computer lab area and started the process of restoring the 3B2/400.

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Rudy Stefelli photo

The AT&T 3B2 was among the first supermicro class machines. They were expensive and not very popular with universities and hobbyists, so you don't see too many around.

But they were pretty successful in industry, especially in telecommunications. They were designed as phone switches: highly reliable, reasonably well powered for their time. You can still find one here and there if you're lucky.

my_3b2.jpg

I was lucky enough to find this AT&T 3B2/400 late last year and am just about ready to start the restoration. The previous owner says it was running when he last fired it up, and I believe him, but it's got some device driver problems, and maybe (I hope not!) a flaky disk drive.

What you see here is a lot of what I got, but not all. Basically, this came with just about everything you could want in a 3B2/400: the machine (w/ 2 drives and 4MB RAM), a very complete documentation set, the complete operating system (though not the unbundled development set), several multi-port serial cards, a couple of SCSI cards, a couple of ethernet cards, a couple of old ethernet hubs, an extra power supply, a couple of extra disks, and a few other things that I can't remember right now. A really good haul, and all I payed was shipping!

So now I'll undertake getting it running as new. Along the way I would love to find a development set for the machine. They are a bit hard to come by.

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