Connecting a Cipher 5400 tape drive to a Sun 3/60

[d***@gmail.com]

Hi,

I need to source a cable to connect a Cipher 5400 tape drive to a Sun 3/60. The main problem is that I cannot find out any technical information about the Cipher. Does anyone have one? What I know for sure is that the Cipher has a female 37 pin D-sub connector. I think it is uses RS422, but at this stage that's just a guess. I could open the device up and look at the chips to see if I can work out which comms standard it is using, but that approach may be difficult.

If anyone knows anything about this device that would be great!

Thanks,
David.

[DoN. Nichols]

Post by d***@gmail.com
Hi,
I need to source a cable to connect a Cipher 5400 tape drive to a Sun
3/60. The main problem is that I cannot find out any technical
information about the Cipher. Does anyone have one? What I know for
sure is that the Cipher has a female 37 pin D-sub connector. I think it
is uses RS422, but at this stage that's just a guess. I could open the
device up and look at the chips to see if I can work out which comms
standard it is using, but that approach may be difficult.

I doubt that it would talk RS422. There is not enough
intellegence in the box for that -- and that would be slow.

It is a parallel interface -- I *think* that it may be something
like a QIC-02 interface. And to be used with a Sun 3/60 it would need
an external card to convert the QIC-02 to SCSI. Most of the Sun-3
"BootBoxes" which held one disk and one tape drive had for both the disk
(which had an ESDI interface) and for the tape drive (again, I *think* a
QIC-02) there was a board to adapt each to the SCSI which came out the
back of the BootBox (actually two SCSI connections so you could loop to
another BootBox with two disks in it). I think that Emulex made the
cards to adapt, and in the BootBox, the half-height tape drive was on
riser to make it full height, and in that riser was mounted the adaptor
card. The adaptor card for the disk drive was mounted to the side of
the interior of the box as there was no other place to hide it.

The cable for this would be a DD-50 to DD-50 (D-shaped
connector, three rows of pins for a total of 50 pins). I've used both
round cables and 50-conductor wide ribbon cables, depending on the
connectors which I had at the time.

There *may* be an adaptor card in the box, in which case the
37-pin connector (DC-37) would be a subset of the SCSI pinout -- with
grounds shared between a few pins, instead of having a separate ground
conductor for each signal conductor.

And be careful of the external terminator power. IIRC the 3/60
has that pin grounded, and if the jumper is set on one of the adaptor
cards to provide TERMPWR it can cook a conductor in a ribbon cable,
burning it into two separate sub-ribbon cables. (It may still work,
with that conductor burned out. :-)

Post by d***@gmail.com
If anyone knows anything about this device that would be great!
Thanks,
David.

Not enough to help you make the cable, as it probably needs more
than just a cable.

And I've seen some drives in boxes with 37-pin connectors with
an intermediate card not to be confused with the Emulex SCSI adaptor
card.

Good Luck,
DoN.

[d***@gmail.com]

Hey,

Thanks very much for the info. It is a QIC-02 device according to the little information I found online about it.

I'm going to give it to a friend of mine who is an electronics whizz and he will hopefully know what's inside.

Is it possible to still buy one of these BootBoxes? Who made them?

If all else fails could I buy a Sun QIC-02 drive and read the tapes that were written by the Cipher? According to an old advert I found for the Cipher 5400, it is read/write compatible with the IBM 6157. This gives me hope as there is a little more information online about the 6157 and in fact one discussion thread mentioned that when they opened a 6157 up it appeared to be a Cipher 540 (not 5400), so they must be fairly close in spec.

Thanks,
David.

[DoN. Nichols]

Post by d***@gmail.com
Hey,
Thanks very much for the info. It is a QIC-02 device according to the
little information I found online about it.

O.K. My memory was close enough, then. :-)

Post by d***@gmail.com
I'm going to give it to a friend of mine who is an electronics whizz
and he will hopefully know what's inside.

Depending on how old he is, it may or may not make much sense to
him. He wants experience with the old Sun-3 machines to make it easy.
:-) it took me a while to learn how to deal with such drives.

Post by d***@gmail.com
Is it possible to still buy one of these BootBoxes? Who made them?

"ShoeBox" was a common slang term for the box, which was bigger
than a "shoebox" (a common term at the time for a single full-height
5-1/4" disk drive in a box), so the larger "BootBox" was considered
appropriate for holding boots, rather than a reference to booting the
system. (Though it was used for that, so consider it a pun as well. :-)

As for who made them -- it was Sun themselves. The drives and
power supply were commercial devices at the time, along with the
adaptor cards. If you read the web site (it looks like it has useful
information to you) you will see a mention of removing internal
terminators. Those will be found on either the disc adaptor or the tape
adaptor, not on the disc or tape drive themselves.

I've found a web site with an image showing one -- to the right
of a 3/60 (or maybe a 3/50).

<http://www.employees.org/~kirk/page0200.html>

The one shown has only a disk in it (on the right-hand side), and a
beefy power supply (on the left-side). The black rectangle near the
middle is a blanking panel -- but *could* be a tape drive instead, with
luck. This at least shows you what one looks like from the front. It
is a hefty box. The drive was something like a 300 MB (yes 'M' not 'G')
ESDI drive as supplied, though I have put native SCSI drives in such a
box.

Post by d***@gmail.com
If all else fails could I buy a Sun QIC-02 drive and read the tapes
that were written by the Cipher?

Not *new*, you couldn't. Sun has not sold such drives for a
long time. (And Sun has been taken over by Oracle a few years ago.)

And Sun always adapted the QIC-02 (and later) drives to SCSI
with an appropriate card.

Post by d***@gmail.com
According to an old advert I found for
the Cipher 5400, it is read/write compatible with the IBM 6157. This
gives me hope as there is a little more information online about the
6157 and in fact one discussion thread mentioned that when they opened a
6157 up it appeared to be a Cipher 540 (not 5400), so they must be
fairly close in spec.

Whether you can read it on a Sun drive (and those are also
getting rather long in the tooth) will depend on what it was written by.
I've got some AT&T Unix-PC (7300/3B1) systems which used similar drives
as "floppy tape". The tape was treated as a floppy disk using a floppy
controller chip. Each track was considered to be a cylinder with a very
large number of sectors. It got 23 MB on a tape which when treated
properly would hold 60 MB. It took forever, because after each 'sector"
it wrote, it would have to back up and read it to verify it. A process
akin to "shoeshining" the heads. Such tapes would be unreadable on any
normal SCSI interfaced drives.

So -- what kind of system wrote the tapes you are wanting to
read? If it was a Sun -- then look for the proper adaptor cards and
such.

BTW Later drives used by Sun for that type of tapes were native
SCSI, but the Sun-3 period used adapted cards "officially".

And -- one mention in the web page reminded me that you need to
jumper your drives as having no parity for the Sun-3 machines. I
remember installing a full OS from the 4.1.1 tapes, and not being able
to boot it until I changed the drive's jumper to no parity. (Sun-4
machines and later *wanted* parity enabled, but the Sun-3 ones could
not live with it from the boot ROM. Once the OS was booted, it could
determine whether a drive had parity or not and switch as needed.

Good Luck,
DoN.

[d***@gmail.com]

Hey DoN,

Thanks very much for all the information! My friend is pretty experienced and he found that the interface is classic QIC-02, with no SCSI adaptor. The capacitors are good and the capstan hasn't turned to goo yet (as apparently they can).

He thought that an adaptor board is going to necessary, and he found one post suggesting an Emulex MT-02 was suitable. Looking at the sun hardware FAQ this does seem a possibility (although the Cipher 5400 is not specifically mentioned there, but a Cipher QIC-36 is - does that mean that QIC-02 would not be supported, or could SCSI/QIC boards support multiple QIC standards?). So it is clear now that I need an adaptor but not 100% sure which one. The Sun FAQ also mentions a Sysgen SC4000 and I've also seen mention of a Wangtek board. Perhaps any of these would do the job? Difficult to say, I guess. There is an Emulex MT-02 asking for $400 on EBay right now which is a fairly expensive experiment should it prove not to work. Also it seems to be about four times the price of similar boards, so I will continue to research and look. With $400 I could buy a lot of Sun kit! Also, it's just a board, no PS, no connectors and no housing, which leads me onto...

On the shoebox device, I found more information on Wikipedia;

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-2

(See a little way down the page where they refer to a disk and tape subsystem). Seems that it was introduced specifically for the Sun 2/50 as a boot device. I will look out for one of these as that may provide a ready made solution here, although I suspect they are rare as hens teeth. If you know any dealers that might have one please let me know. That Wiki page mentions that the DD-50 SCSI pin D connector is proprietary to Sun, which may complicate matters when it comes to hooking up an adaptor.

So, not quite connected yet, but getting to the point where I know what I need, sort of. I'll bear your comments about jumpers etc when I actually have something to switch on and plug into!

Thanks again,
David.

[DoN. Nichols]

Post by d***@gmail.com
Hey DoN,
Thanks very much for all the information! My friend is pretty
experienced and he found that the interface is classic QIC-02, with no
SCSI adaptor. The capacitors are good and the capstan hasn't turned to
goo yet (as apparently they can).

Good -- on all points.

Post by d***@gmail.com
He thought that an adaptor board is going to necessary, and he found
one post suggesting an Emulex MT-02 was suitable. Looking at the sun
hardware FAQ this does seem a possibility (although the Cipher 5400 is
not specifically mentioned there, but a Cipher QIC-36 is - does that
mean that QIC-02 would not be supported, or could SCSI/QIC boards
support multiple QIC standards?).

I don't know for sure, there.

But there is another thing to watch out for. Typically, each
QIC drive will write only a single density, and will read tapes
written by the previous version only.

Now -- if you are wanting to read the install tapes for the
SunOs 4.1.1 for the Sun-3 family, you will want the version which will
handle a 60 MB tape. I've got some which will ready 60 MB and write 150
MB tape. But the Sun-2 drives were something like 20 MB or so maximum,
so you could not use that old a drive. (The 60 MB drives need the
adaptor cards, the 150 MB cards are native SCSI, so you could read
the boot tapes, but not write them.) This may make a difference if you
want to make newer copies of the tapes. (The install tape and the U2
tape.)

Another consideration with newer disk drives and the older Sun-3
machines is that there is a bug in the SCSI drivers which affects disks
above 2 GB in size. It does not show up until you get bad blocks and
the system replaces the bad blocks with something beyond the 2GB point.
The problem is that the upper bits of the block address get truncated,
so the replacement block is really pulled from somewhere in the
early part of the disk -- the area where the OS is installed. When this
was discovered, they issued a patch to the SPARC version (sun4), but not
the MC68020 version (sun3). So -- avoid disks larger than 2GB on the
Sun-3. It will work for a while, but will then bite you.

The mention of duplicating the tapes -- there is an open-source
program called "tprobe" which does that very nicely -- if you have a
drive which can write the density you need.

Post by d***@gmail.com
So it is clear now that I need an
adaptor but not 100% sure which one. The Sun FAQ also mentions a Sysgen
SC4000 and I've also seen mention of a Wangtek board. Perhaps any of
these would do the job? Difficult to say, I guess. There is an Emulex
MT-02 asking for $400 on EBay right now which is a fairly expensive
experiment should it prove not to work. Also it seems to be about four
times the price of similar boards, so I will continue to research and
look. With $400 I could buy a lot of Sun kit! Also, it's just a board,
no PS, no connectors and no housing, which leads me onto...

That $400.00 price is from a dealer of repair parts who sell to
service contractors who have contracts to keep older systems running.
They will pay insane prices (that may be more than it sold for new).

Post by d***@gmail.com
On the shoebox device, I found more information on Wikipedia;
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-2
(See a little way down the page where they refer to a disk and tape
subsystem). Seems that it was introduced specifically for the Sun 2/50
as a boot device. I will look out for one of these as that may provide a
ready made solution here, although I suspect they are rare as hens
teeth. If you know any dealers that might have one please let me know.
That Wiki page mentions that the DD-50 SCSI pin D connector is
proprietary to Sun, which may complicate matters when it comes to
hooking up an adaptor.

I had not realized that it dated back to the Sun-2 period. And
they seem to call it "shoebox" while I was using that name for smaller
housings, and calling that "bootbox".

I had a 2/120 as my first home Sun. It did not have the SMD
tower, however. Instead, it had a QIC tape drive of a very early flavor
(used 28 VDC power instead of 12 VDC along with the 5V, and as a bit of
a hazard, it used the same connector commonly used to get 12V and 5V to
disk drives, so the opportunity to plug in the wrong device and fry it
was always present. :-) It had the tape drive inside at the top (left
hand tower in the photo), and the ESDI (or was it even MFM?) disk drive
and adaptor card were tucked in there as well. A *lot* lighter than the
SMD disks. I've used the Fujitsu 84 MB SMD drive (2312K I think) on an
earlier unix box which was based on the MB68000 CPU, and ran a V7 unix
(no virtual memory in that one -- it took advances in the 68010 to make
that possible.

Post by d***@gmail.com
So, not quite connected yet, but getting to the point where I know
what I need, sort of. I'll bear your comments about jumpers etc when I
actually have something to switch on and plug into!

O.K

Good Luck,
DoN.