30 Apr
2015
30 Apr
'15
8:38 p.m.
So after having suffered a power supply failure immediately followed by
a disk failure, I'm happy to report that the Ridge is now back up and
running (and has been for the last 24 hours...) If anyone wants an
account to play around on perhaps the only running machine of its kind,
let me know! Maybe it'll stay up for awhile this time :).
- Josh
On 3/28/15 10:32 PM, Josh Dersch wrote:
And, of course, right after I send this out, after
having run
flawlessly all day, one of the +12V rails has gone poof. Looks like I
have some more debugging on my hands :)
- Josh
On 3/28/15 10:16 PM, Josh Dersch wrote:
Hey all --
Last summer I picked up a Ridge 32/330 that became available
locally. This is a fairly obscure early RISC machine intended to be
a competitor to the VAX, it uses a 32-bit CPU at 12.5Mhz built from
discrete components (spanning three large PCBs). Mine's outfitted
with 8mb of ECC memory, Pertec, SMD and SCSI QIC controllers, and
Ethernet.
You can see some pictures of this beast at:
https://plus.google.com/117997069161125071032/posts/JtsR3BokUxp?pid=6063976…
I got it running late last year after rebuilding the QIC tape drive
and dealing with some intermittent failures due to a couple of
low-quality DIP sockets. I now have a set of dedicated 20A circuits
installed in my basement so I can run it for longer periods of time
without worrying about burning my house down, so I'll be running it
for the next couple of weeks just for fun to keep the basement warm
and run up my electrical bill :).
It's currently running RX/V 1.1 (Ridge's UNIX variant) and it's on
the Internet (indirectly, since exposing a 25-year old UNIX directly
to the 'net seems like a bad idea). I thought maybe some people here
might be interested in checking it out since it's pretty obscure, if
you want an account to play around, drop me a line and I can hook you
up. I don't know of any other Ridge machines out there (running or
not) -- if you have one let me know, there's very little information
out there on these things.
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; it looks like it contains a valid partition table, but it
will not boot. I didn't want to wipe it so the Ridge is currently
running off of a spare drive -- I'd like to hook it up externally to
dump an image from the running RX/V system. If anyone has one to
loan (preferably within driving distance of Seattle) let me know.
Once that's done, it's time to figure out how to get the Eagle that
came with it running again...
And a huge thanks to Al Kossow for archiving the OS media that's on
Bitsavers, without which this machine would be a very large boat
anchor taking up many cubic feet in my basement. (If anyone has any
media or docs for this that aren't on Bitsavers, let me know -- I'm
in particular looking for an ROS distribution on QIC media...)
- Josh