NCR Minis: Re: PeeCee clones; was:PCW's 25 worst tech products

I spent some time with the NCR minis at AT&T and a soon to bankrupt major airline. The premier box was the 3600, which was probably the box that the original poster described as "2 refrigerators", or some such...it was about that big or bigger. As I recall, it had up to 32 i486 processors (I vaugly recall a Pentium upgrade, and maybe a PPro one) and used some Teradata interconnect IP. They were touted as "data warehouse" boxes, and were usually used for some big DB app. Million dollar boxes. Ran pretty bog standard SVR4. I never saw a place to plug a keyboard and mouse into one of these... Then there were the 3550, 3500 and 3450 (at least...I think there were more). Proprietary Pentium multiprocessor, Microchannel minis...well constructed and fast for the time. Kinda sorta like Sequents. They ran SVR4 or SVR3.2, and I've seen at least one of them run NT 3.1. Someone even thought about porting Linux to the thing: http://www.anime.net/~goemon/linux-3550/. I shall not hold my breath. All of this stuff was superceeded by the Worldmark line, which was pretty much standard multiproc Intel stuff with an NCR badge.