3 Dec
2003
3 Dec
'03
12:50 p.m.
See embedded comments
On Wed, 3 Dec 2003, Ian Primus wrote:
my car is sagging from the weight of an IBM AS/400
Model 9404. It's
Heh heh, I managed to fit one of these into a two door Mitsubishi
Eclipse. I had to remove most everything to lift it, however.
very heavy, and I can't lift it alone, so it's
going to have to stay
there until I can get a friend to help me lift it out and get it into
the house, but I have the panels, tape drive and battery backup unit
inside (I took them out to make it lighter and easier to load).
Unfortunately, the machine is missing it's hard
drives, as well as
their carriers. It does, however, have a tape drive installed, and
seems to have it's full compliment of boards.
You might be screwed. If it a beige CISC model you probably are. It does
not run linux and the raw assembly code of the machine remains an IBM
proprietary secret. All non-IBM code ran an abstracted assembly code.
Most CISC 9404's maxed out at comically small amounts of RAM compared even
to machines of similar age. (My 9404-E20 had 8 MB as I recall which at
that feature code was the max)
You need special licensed code tapes to recreate the OS if the disks are
missing and then a secret number from IBM to keep it running past 90 days
of OS install. The manual which came with my 9404 even claimed there was
a movement sensor in the Operator control panel (with the display and key
which contains the proprietary licensing bits) which would cause the
system to demand a new code if it sensed too much movement.
The boards are probably all worthless, even on Ebay, unless possibly you
have an ethernet or token ring board.
Newer RISC models are substantially less onerous in their licensing. The
movement sensor is gone, the OS is sold with the machine not separately.
Like a HP3000, a faster CPU is still nop'd down to a less efficient level
if you have not purchased the highest 'trim line' of the server.
You can run some sort of linux partition on some of the newest ones.
Paul
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