> ----------
> From: Pat Finnegan
>
> On Tue, 5 Feb 2002, Pat Finnegan wrote:
>
> > Over at Purdue Salvage, they have an RS/6000 Model 7013 'space heater'
> > sized system. On the front it says 'Power Server 560(590?)' Any ideas
> on
> > value, and is anyone interested?
>
> It is aparently a PowerServer 550L, has 64M of ram (filled card), some
> sort of framebuffer card (TI DSP's on it and 3 mini-coax connectors stuck
> in a DE-9 or DA-15 connector shell, like a Sun video connector, but
> without the extra pins), builtin 10Base2 and AUI ethernet, SCSI, 3 hard
> drive, tape drive, floppy drive, and probably other things I'm fogetting
> to mention.
>
> One of the hard drives (which I have yet to determine the size of) was
> completely unhooked from the scsi bus and power, so it's probably either a
> spare or broken..
>
> Any ideas on where to get a bootable tape so I can reset root's password
> (haven't booted it yet, still gotta try that first.)
>
> -- Pat
> West Lafayette, IN
>
I do say, dear boy, that sounds like a nice little score!
--- David A Woyciesjes
--- C & IS Support Specialist
--- Yale University Press
--- mailto:david.woyciesjes@yale.edu
--- (203) 432-0953
--- ICQ # - 90581
Mac OS X 10.1.2 - Darwin Kernel Version 5.2: Fri Dec 7 21:39:35 PST 2001
Running since 01/22/2002 without a crash
Preservation of less common software and documentation, mostly
concentrating on mid-60's to late 70's minicomputers right now.
Tech support / research for simulator writers
Xerox workstation archaeology.
I have a pretty varied collection. If I had to claim a
specialty, it would be "high-end" systems. Perhaps I
could specialize even further and say "graphics
workstations," but that would leave out several machines
which I'm very interested in -- the PDP-11 series, VAXen
(Unless I manage to find an old Intergraph...)
I've also become very interested in vector processors
recently, though most of those are way too large for my
current resources.
Most of my collection consists of machines which I find
interesting, and / or unusually innovative or powerful
given the time of release.
Generally this means:
SGI
NeXT
DEC
Other datacenter/workstation type machines -- for instance,
I have one SPARC (two, but only one that is setup...), one
HP 9000, and a Sequent S81 (multiprocessor fridge sized
box with up to 30 i386/16Mhz CPUs and matching Weitek co-
processors), MIPS M/120 (Interesting to me since I see
a lot of MIPS influence in modern SGI systems...) An Atari
ST (newest machine I can think of with the entire O/S in
ROM -- excluding embedded systems.)
Early machines (the earlier the better. I only have one
slide-rule, though, and one abacus)
I also have a collection of interesting or significant
home micros... A couple of apples (notably a IIGS), an
Amiga (I would like a better one, actually...), a Heath H8
(interesting because of the front-panel, if for no other
reason)
Things that I'm missing would include:
Intergraph
A working NeXT (of any sort. I have a slab, but no monitor
cable or mouse -- I'm getting there... would also like a
cube)
A Unibus PDP-11. Preferably with blinkenlights, 8" disks,
DECTape, etc, etc...
A hardcopy terminal (Though, I'm supposed to get one
sometime soon...)
At Atari ATW (well, I can dream, right? :)
A Cray EL92 (or 94, or something)
A lisp machine
An RS/6000 (I'd actually like to find a smaller one of
these...)
An AS/400 (Yes, I know somebody offered one up recently,
but imagine having it shipped! Anyway, I'm holding out
for the Cray :)
A working Alpha (I'm well on my way to getting my
Multia running)
Chris
Christopher Smith, Perl Developer
Amdocs - Champaign, IL
/usr/bin/perl -e '
print((~"\x95\xc4\xe3"^"Just Another Perl Hacker.")."\x08!\n");
'
>I really should find out if my Macintosh II, with the scribbled date under
>the lid, is rare or not,
I know the original macs all had sigs in the case (128, 512s, plus, se,
and I think into the SE/30 is when they stopped)... I have also heard
rumor that the original II series had sigs or similar in the case (II,
IIx, IIcx)... but being as I dont have those 3 (yet), I can't check for
myself.
But hey... I am sure if you took it to Antiques Road Show, they would
tell you it is worth a few grand easy.
>just to make you jealous Chris... ;-)
Well... at least as of tomorrow, we will have a fair fight when swinging
SE/30's... I'm driving into NYC to pick up an SE/30 and an 840AV with a
SpigotProAV card (the SE/30 is pretty well loaded, 32mb RAM with 200mb
HD... so it looks like I will finally get around to installing NetBSD on
a Mac... and I have to look into the Spigot card... if it can capture to
MPEG, I might turn the 840 into a standalone VCD burner... but from first
checks, looks like the Spigot captures to a propritary JPEG format)
-chris
<http://www.mythtech.net>
On February 6, William S. wrote:
> What is your opinion of the DS10 Alpha as an entry level
> current "production" machine. I was thinking that my
> next acquisition might be something more contemporary.
> I found an interesting reference to one here:
>
> http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/Resources/Computing/halley.html
>
> ... which got me interested.
There's nothing "entry level" about a DS10. Those machines are
frighteningly powerful, even the lower of the two versions. But yes,
it's a wonderful machine.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
St. Petersburg, FL "Less talk. More synthohol." --Lt. Worf
> ----------
> From: Chris
>
> >There are
> >exactly five MacOSes worth using: 6.0.8, 7.1, 8.1, 9.1 and 10.1.x and up.
>
> I agree 99%... I prefer 7.5.5 over 7.1... I have just found it more
> stable but YMMV
>
> (and 9.2 sucks ass... my iMac won't stop crashing since I moved to it
> from 9.1... I think it was an apple trick to push people to OS X... which
> I just haven't fallen in love with yet, probably because most of what I
> use isn't carbonized)
>
> -chris
>
> <http://www.mythtech.net>
>
Huh? 9.1 caused more problems for me, and 9.2 fixed them. And OSX,
yes I am definitely diggin' it. Not using my Win98 box here at work anymore,
it's sitting on a desk behind me now...
--- David A Woyciesjes
--- C & IS Support Specialist
--- Yale University Press
--- mailto:david.woyciesjes@yale.edu
--- (203) 432-0953
--- ICQ # - 90581
Mac OS X 10.1.2 - Darwin Kernel Version 5.2: Fri Dec 7 21:39:35 PST 2001
Running since 01/22/2002 without a crash
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Stan Sieler [mailto:sieler@allegro.com]
> Did you try to look up a price with the HP model
> number for the battery that I gave you?
Nope -- been busy. It's pretty bad when you can't get time
to look up the price of a battery on a web-page. :)
Chris
Christopher Smith, Perl Developer
Amdocs - Champaign, IL
/usr/bin/perl -e '
print((~"\x95\xc4\xe3"^"Just Another Perl Hacker.")."\x08!\n");
'
On February 5, William Donzelli wrote:
> Once in a Blue Moon, you might come across an RS/6000 with a strange tag
> (6611 Network Processor, I think). They are basically Powerserver 220 and
> 320 machines, but with the V.35 and Ethernet cards. Sometimes these cards
> are still installed. Grab them at all costs. I have found them in these
> before, at hamfests and junkyards. Nearly all of the early RS960s went back
> to IBM, or were scrapped.
Oh YES! ...enss230.digex.net was one of those. We had an NSFnet T1
for a long while, it came up in March of 1993. That was one FAST
router. The thing that bugged me about it was that it was HUGE...or
rather, the rack it was in was huge. It was a desktop box, about rack
width and maybe 6" tall, but they put it in an extended-width short
rack about the size of a washing machine. The set it in there on the
floor of the rack, VERTICALLY, with a U-shaped shroud around it. The
rack was mostly empty space! On top of it were the two 1U rackmount
Cylink CSU/DSUs (main and spare), an Exabyte tape drive, and a modem
for remote management.
We got fed up with it taking up so much space in our tiny computer
room that we took it all apart during a config window and re-racked it
in one of our nice compact Sun racks. :) When the IBM CE came out to
"maintain" the system we sent him away, pointing to a FEMA contract
that required us to restrict access to our computer room to
"authorized personnel", of which he wasn't one...so they never busted
us. When our contract ended and we had to return the machine, we
hastily reassembled it back into its [huge] glory and gave it back to
them at the door. :)
We weren't given accounts on the machine. We were a bunch of
old-school hacker types, every one of us paranoid having come from the
defense industry, and we couldn't stand the idea of the ANS guys
running this Unix box on our network that we didn't have access
to...and we knew it was their NOC's procedure to dial into it, log in,
and check the logs if the machine ever went down. So one day we
rigged up a serial sniffer between the machine and the modem, and
power-cycled it...waited 'til they dialed in, and sniffed the root
password. It pained us to do that to a running unix machine, but hey,
it got us access to the machine.
Those RS960 cards were the first production router interfaces (on ANY
router) that could route a T3 at full speed, if memory serves.
We had to set up a local router on the ethernet to BGP peer with that
RS/6000 as part of our agreement with ANS for the T1. Our company was
DIRT poor; we couldn't afford a Cisco (lots of hand-waving and
trickery got us the ANS T1 for free for many, many months thanks to
the brilliant guy who was running the company) so we built out a
SPARCstation-2 and loaded up NetBSD/sparc 0.9 (I *think* it was
v0.9)...ran gated on it...and peered it up with enss230. It worked
like a champ, with 9,000 routes in the routing table, and never
crashed. It was amazing!
Firing up nslookup just now, I find enss230.digex.net is still in DNS
at its original IP address...an "A" record that I myself put into the
nameserver tables nine years ago.
Anyway, sorry for being a windbag...I first moved to the DC area in
the beginning of 1993 to "do that Digex thing" and now I've recently
moved away; kinda the "end of an era" for me and a major part of my
life.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
St. Petersburg, FL "Less talk. More synthohol." --Lt. Worf
