On Sun, Dec 26, 1999 at 11:57:10AM +0100, Michael Lorenz wrote:
> A friend of mine just got his hands on a NCR Tower 32 ( no idea which
> model, I didn't see it yet ) and we will spend the next weeks in trying
> to get it into some useful state ( it boots some kind of System V he
> told me ). So I have the following questions:

The Tower 32 is a 68020-based machine from about 1987 that normally runs
System V release 3, pretty much straight as it came from AT&T. It's at the
slow end of things by today's standard. IIRC, it used the stock 68020 VM
hardware. It's probably got no more than 16 meg of RAM and a QIC-150 tape
drive on a dedicated controller; the disks are probably MFM or RLL, maybe
first-generation SCSI. Hardware docs are likely to be nonexistent, since the
machine was built before NCR abandoned the 68000 line for Intel, which in
turn was before AT&T bought them out and then spun them off again. I
strongly doubt any NetBSD will run on it without a porting effort that's
likely to be quite difficult; OTOH, you should have the tools you need to
make such an effort right on that system. In its time, compiling stuff off
the net for the Tower series was pretty straightforward, since there were no
significant weirdnesses to the Tower's Unix.

I'd recommend leaving it as a stock SysVR3, myself, unless you somehow
manage to lay hands on hardware docs for it.