Wang VS45 Restoration

September 17, 2011

Ryan found the VS 25 manual online, and concluded that the error code received (B0-32) means that the system is assessing an internal hard disk, which is returning a fault, or isn't there.

September 16, 2011

Merle, Ryan and Dan began a restoration project today on the Wang VS45. The VS45 used Wang's CP5 CPU and was capable of supporting up to 16 users. It was a complete 16 bit system: I/O, memory and system buses were all 16 bits wide. The VS45 was upgraded to a vs65, and a CP7 CPU, support for 30-48 users, and an increased memory bus size of 16 to 32 bits.

 October 8, 2011 

Dan, Mike, and Warren spent a few minutes working on the VS45. With the boot selector switch in the middle the system can't find the internal disk drive. We need to open the system to see if the drive is installed, spinning, and the heads are unlocked. We setting the boot selector switch in the lower position to boot from an external drive and got the same results. The external drive had the address set to 3. We found several fixed disk drives that had the address set to 1, and removable drives that had the address set to 0. Maybe the external bootable drive needs it's address set to 1? 

We found an 8" Wang floppy diskette containing a CP5 Stand Alone Utility. We tried booting from this diskette, but it reported a "drive not ready" error. We tried substituting a SA851 floppy drive for the SA850 in the VS45, but got seek errors. There are LOTS of jumpers on the floppy drive PCB, so it is likely that we didn't have the SA851 drive configured correctly. We looked for other SA850 drives in the warehouse, but only found lots of SA851 drives.

David K. Bryant has a Wang Field Engineer's manual and just sent a spreadsheet that shows the SMD controller switch settings. It looks like you need to tell the controller what type of drive is connected. We need to verify the settings on the SMD controller and determine the address settings for the drives.