5 Sep
1998
5 Sep
'98
7:57 a.m.
I used to maintain one of these beasties in the late 1980's. It used
Altos III
terminals, which were just WYSE-50's with different color plasteek and
slightly different firmware.
It ran XENIX, which it seemed like it was of Edition 7 vintage. This
particular
one was a bit tempremental, and went down every few months or so
due to hardware problems.
It used a pair of Quantum 40MB FH hard disks. It think it could
accomodate
a 60 or an 80 as well, if I'm not mistaken (as I frequently am).
Actually, it was a cool little machine. It was used for Cellular
Telephone billing,
and I learned how to use Unix on it. Shoot, I even remember the default
root
password after the Xenix was installed: 'sotla' :-)
Jeff
On Sat, 5 Sep 1998 11:09:04 -0500 "David Williams" <dlw(a)trailingedge.com>
writes:
On 5 Sep 98, at 11:52, Allison J Parent wrote:
_____________________________________________________________________
You don't need to buy Internet access to use free Internet e-mail.
Get completely free e-mail from Juno at http://www.juno.com
Or call Juno at (800) 654-JUNO [654-5866]
No, server is a newer concept. It was an
integrated multiuser system
where
there was one CPU (Z80) per user and likely ran
CP/M, MPM (or clone
like
turbodos). The 8086 was likely a local server
for disks and such to
the
local z80s. They all used the bus as a
physically short network to
exchange data.
The Altos 586 ran Xenix off the 8086 IIRC. My father's office used
one about that time for their accounting. They looked at the Altos,
a Fortune and one other Unix based system at the time and picked
the Altos. They felt the company had a little better staying power
over the others. Not a bad little system, they ran 3 users with no
more than 1 meg of memory and could have put a couple more on
it. Don't recall the sizes of the disks.
-----
David Williams - Computer Packrat
dlw(a)trailingedge.com
http://www.trailingedge.com