[iansmith]

Hello, I have two SGI Iris Indigo XS 24 machines that I bought 20 years ago and have sat since then.

The problem is that when I got them, the little 8-pin DIPs that stored some kind of serial number were missing.  Buyer claimed they must have fallen out in shipping, but they wouldn't boot without them so I just boxed them and forgot about them until I moved back here recently and found them in storage.

My question is, does anyone know what these are and how to replace them?  I vaguely recall being told they were either EEPROMS or small 8-bit Microcontrollers and that you could program them with the serial/id number from the disk drives.  I do have one working set of drives, the System and Option drive.  The drive in the other box never spun up, even when I first bought it.

I am not sure if either of the boxes are operational. They power on, I get a green light on the front and even a beep but nothing after that.  I've tried to hook up the serial port to get to the console but get nothing.  Not sure if the cable I have is correct, it's a Belkin F2V088-06.  

I also have a video cable and with a 13W3 to VGA adapter adapter, but get nothing out of that either. But I have no idea what kind of signal it would be putting out anyway.

Also available to me is a Sun keyboard which I assume is compatible, I hope?  I have Ethernet transceivers as well so can net boot it if it can. That's how I got my Sun Sparc's running.

Anyone have any suggestions? Will these things give me any kind of console or video output without that chip, or do I need to find one of them first?