Fep on Symbolics LISP Engineering

FEP on Serial

Mon, 04 Jul 2016 17:26:41 +0000

Getting the FEP display on the serial port isn’t hard - as long as you want to use the serial port built onto the console. So far I haven’t seen a way to tell the FEP to use the serial port built onto the I/O Board.

FEP Command: Show Configuration
XL1200 4.0 Processor; Serial number SN-582; Reveision level: 1.0
I/O Board 0; Revision level: 5.0
2048k words physical memory at 00000000000
2048k words physical memory at 00010000000
Black and white Moniterm console 0

To get the FEP to talk to the serial port on the console simply connect a normal DB25 serial cable to the back of the console and to your serial port (or USB-to-serial in my case).

Autoboot Serial/Telnet and X

Sat, 02 Jul 2016 01:43:26 +0000

I’ve decided to take a minor detour when I get back from the gaming convention to make a disk image for someone with an XL400 without a working console. My goal here will be to make a world which will auto boot into the FEP with the serial port I/O enabled for FEP commands if possible, and then auto-load and start a world which will put a Genera/Lisp command prompt on the serial port and/or be listening on (TCP) Telnet on a defined private IP address for remote connections. Then, using Telnet, the user can run Start X Screen and use Genera from an X Windows server. Hopefully this will get him up and running until he has an opportunity to repair his console.

Large SCSI Disks and XL1201

Fri, 24 Jun 2016 02:57:49 +0000

TL;DR:

SCSI disks with 20M 1280-byte blocks work
SCSI disks with 25M 1280-byte blocks work
SCSI disks with 28M 1280-byte blocks work
SCSI disks with 28,870,145 1280-byte blocks works

Both Narrow and Wide single-ended SCSI drives work - the wide ones with appropriate

Chances are I was having problems with the full ~28.9M blocks initially because I didn’t power-off reboot the XL1201 after the full .

Details

I have a Seagate Barracuda ST336918N, a 50-pin narrow SCSI drive which is formatted at 1,280 byte blocks. Unfortunately, the XL1201 cannot create an FEP filesystem.