1 May
2005
1 May
'05
11:43 a.m.
On Sat, 2005-04-30 at 23:24 -0500, Scott Stevens wrote:
Today at a local municipal auction I got an exciting
new find:
An H-P Apollo Series 735 Workstation.
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
monitor (the main system has three BNC out video)
Good-quality PC monitors will do sync-on-green quite happily by the way,
so hack up a cable if needs be (or if you have an Iiyama display they've
got BNC on the back anyway so it's easy)
and I never saw the keyboard, but it was probably
there.
These only use an HP-HIL keyboard from memory, so sourcing one of those
should be pretty easy - it's the Domain keyboard on the earlier Apollos
that's impossible to get hold of...
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.
And won't be able to shut it down cleanly without a keyboard... I'd
leave that for the moment if I were you!
Console... hmm... I think the 7xx machines are really just stock HP
boxes piggybacking on the Apollo name. One of the guys at the museum
swears it will run Apollo's DomainOS (and that there was a port to the
PA-RISC 7xx systems) but he's the only person I've ever heard that from.
Earlier 68k-based Apollos certainly did support serial console as some
of the range were specifically shipped without framebuffers for use as
servers.
What OS did a system of this vintage run? By looking
at chip markings,
etc, it appears to be about a 1990 vintage system.
HP-UX and *BSD certainly - I think Linux too. See above though; I'm
questionable about DomainOS (which is the interesting reason for owning
an Apollo!)
I'm really upset with myself that I wasn't
more 'on the ball' with this
system.
Well it's not as bad as you may think. Proper keyboard and a suitable
screen should be pretty easy to find, and the fact that it has a disk
inside at least means there's a chance it has an intact OS.
I'm going to have to settle for serial console for
the time being, if that's even possible.
I'd pull the framebuffer, disconnect the internal disk, hook up a serial
console, and see what happens to be honest. I can't see doing that
breaking anything. I'm not sure if the lack of keyboard would be enough
to convince it that it's running headless, but hopefully the lack of
framebuffer will and there'll be the code in ROM to handle it.
Anyhow, it's a cool 'tall narrow' tower
system to add to my collection
and it's beautifully high quality construction.
Yep, we've got a couple, along with three 4xx machines (proper Apollos).
Still short a couple of late-model Domain keyboards though, and one of
the feet kits to allow the 4xx machines to stand upright...
cheers
Jules