29 Mar
2015
29 Mar
'15
6:14 p.m.
On 3/29/15 11:17 AM, Jules Richardson wrote:
It has a Ridge asset
tag, and I was told that it was used internally for
testing database software. That may be what the Fujitsu Eagle in the
second cabinet was for; the drive is currently inoperable (does not spin
up) and it's really a two-person job to even move it around to debug so
that's going to have to wait for a rainy day or three...
- Josh
On 03/29/2015 12:16 AM, Josh Dersch wrote:
It's a pretty crude
UNIX port, they didn't do much with it to pretty it
up or anything, but it's functional.... (the shutdown process is: run
"shutdown" (no args) then wait for the machine to drop to single-user,
run "sync" a couple of times and turn the machine off. Still makes me
nervous every time :).
But the hardware seems to be very well built and an interesting design.
It's also pretty fast (relative to other machines I have from that era)
at least in terms of integer performance based on a very crude benchmark
I wrote :).
It's a shame there doesn't seem to be more out there in terms of
software for this thing. I have enough documentation for the hardware
to make it seem possible to port NetBSD to it, but that would also
require building an entire toolchain for the CPU and, well, if I had
that kind of time...
Now I just need to fix the power supply...
You can see some pictures of this beast at:
Damn, that's nice :) I always think that "old Unix" is much of a
muchness in machines of this era - the OS is probably nothing that
special; it's the hardware that makes them interesting. I'll add that I'm looking for an external
SMD cabinet and cabling so
that I
can image the original SMD disk that was in the Ridge when I got it
Do you know the history of this particular system? I'd say it's
definitely worth doing, just for whatever software and data (which
might tell some sort of "story") is on the drive.
cheers
Jules