1 May
2005
1 May
'05
6:42 p.m.
On Sat, 30 Apr 2005, Scott Stevens wrote:
Today at a local municipal auction I got an exciting
new find:
An H-P Apollo Series 735 Workstation.
Nice; the system I'm typing on (remotely) is a 735/125 .
I blew it, in part, because all I got was the main
system, an external
SCSI drive array (six differential SCSI drives in an HP box, with
wide-diff cable) and the external CDROM. Somebody else got the big
These are probably 2GB drives; you can still get 8GB drives.
monitor (the main system has three BNC out video) and
I never saw the
keyboard, but it was probably there.
What is the model number in the framebuffer? Some of the 735 framebuffers
were really nice.
I only spied the system in the
mess of PC clones being sold as it came up for bid so I had to buy it in
a group with six other Intel boxes for $5. Shortly thereafter, and
before I noticed it, the monitor for it (marked HP, row of BNC
connectors on back, etc.) went for $1 to somebody else. SERIOUS
headslapping incident. The part that really bugs me is it likely went
to someone seeing 'big screen' and expecting a VGA connector on back.
Too bad. But a good PC monitor that accepts sync on green will work.
I have a few questions for anybody on the list who has
more experience
with Apollo workstations:
Will I be able to use this system over a serial console? I'm hoping it
will 'just come up' with whatever system is on the hard drive, though I
probably won't get past a login prompt. This is the main way I use my
Sun boxes (serial console). Will it just sense the lack of a keyboard
and bring up serial port A?
Sure, these can be used headless. You may have to reconfigure it
"blind". Otherwise, I think that if you pull the framebuffer
then the console will default to the serial port.
What OS did a system of this vintage run? By looking
at chip markings,
etc, it appears to be about a 1990 vintage system.
These can run HPUX 9.x and 10.2 . It is possible to install 11.0,
but tricky as you have to know which stuff is 64-bit and leave it out.
There were two varieties of 735; the original 99MHZ with an HPPA 7100
cpu and the 125 MHz with the newer HPPA 7150 cpu. The I/O cards
needed to have the right PROM to support one or the other.
I'm really upset with myself that I wasn't
more 'on the ball' with this
system. I know I saw the video cable (triple BNC) go away to somebody
else in another box they got really cheap, I saw the monitor there and
know it went for a dollar, and judging by the completeness of parts of
the system that I saw in boxes and the parts that I (thankfully) got, I
am fairly certain there was probably an HP keyboard in the mess, too.
I could have gotten a complete system here, and now I'm going to have to
settle for serial console for the time being, if that's even possible.
Contact me off the list if you need install media.
Carlos E. Murillo-Sanchez