Olivetti FileNet Workstations (Free)

[SpidersWeb]

I'm moving my gear from storage in to my workshop, and some hardware it doesn't make much sense in me keeping as I don't have space. I saved these from recycling a few years ago, which is probably where they should have gone. If nobody wants to pick it up (Porirua, Wellington), I'll store the monitors wrapped in plastic under my house, scrap the cases, and will keep the electronics for parts if I need them in future.

2x Olivetti Filenet workstations from the late 80's. Based on the Motorola 68000.
3x high resolution black and white fibre optic displays
1x high resolution black and white RS422 terminal
A couple of matching keyboards and mice

One system has 3 daughter cards with 68020's (from memory) that each drives a different terminal.

- I don't have the fibre cable (I might have one that's damaged) but it does appear to be a fairly generic arrangement.
- I have not powered up the towers. Previous owner had powered them up and said that one one of them started a monitor program in ROM and he was able to make pixels appear on the displays by addressing different memory points.
- There is no local storage options, all boot from network, and with zero software or information on the internet, you'll be writing your own. As much as I'd like an enormous Olivetti optical storage system from the 80's - can't find many on trademe
- I have powered up one of the monitors (in fact the case is still open) and it started up fine (no smoke show)
- monitors have a board that converts the fibre to a normal signal (video, hsync, vsync etc), so could be replaced with a home brew solution to hook it to something more normal - I'd expect the resolution on these to be in the 1280x1024 range - probably fixed frequency - but no idea for sure. Part of an image processing system.
- other than a few news articles and maybe a picture, the internet can't help you with these.

Thought I'd list it here in case somebody thought it'd be neat as an enourmous 68K dev kit.
Realistically I'm never going to get around to doing anything with them.

Free pickup in Porirua Wellington.
Bring car with good suspension.

[Gibsaw]

So you're talking about the Olivetti LSX 30x0 series?

I thought to myself, surely that can't be right. There must be something out there, but there's sod all... Barely some photos and a mention in wikipedia.

[SpidersWeb]

haha yeah, it's pretty blank out there. I did find an entry in ComputerWorld that mentioned the entry level price was $300,000 USD.
https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=nvg ... et&f=false

Kind of neat though, looking at the controls you'd set which network program to start by flicking configuration switches at the back, then there is a LOAD button on the front to activate the boot process. One of them is the workstation unit to control 4 terminals, the other I think may have been a print server.

They don't look like the LSX series, although wouldn't be surprised if they're based off similar tech (possibly semi-compatible) tech.
Unlike the photos I did find on the internet, mine are straight up and down towers, rather than square boxes - but no mounting options for any kind of drive, quite tall, and silly heavy.