Bell + Howell IDB 2000

[Florian Mayer]

Hi folks,

I recently aquired a Bell and Howell IDB 2000 system with three 
workstations. The boot/data CDROMs (9) came with it. It seems that it is 
an early network computing system. The computing power is in the 
workstations, but they do not have any drives. They have to boot from 
the fileserver. The fileserver starts up but the workstations won't 
boot. I hooked up a laptop with a sniffer software into the Bell and 
Howell network (standard Ethernet). The workstation sends a kind of 
request (propietary, not even TCP/IP) but does not get a reply. I hooked 
up a serial terminal to the console of the server and got a menu system. 
The interesting menus (system administration, configuration etc.) are 
protected with a password. The password has to be standard because the 
server boots from a pressed cdrom.
Does anybody have expieriences with these computers?
p.s. One of the worksations has the label Siemens EPC 2000, but looks 
the same as the Bell + Howell.

best regards
Flori