SGI Indy: I have one. I made the mistake of putting linux on it. It's now the slowest linux box I've ever used... (;

At 2:47 PM -0500 5/10/13, JP Hindin wrote: I have two different SGI O2's. One is the slowest model, the other the second to the fastest. Both run IRIX. I can't believe how well the slowest performs, even under a very heavy load. Zane -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh at aracnet.com | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | | Photographer | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | My flickr Photostream | | http://www.flickr.com/photos/33848088 at N03/ | | My Photography Website | | http://www.zanesphotography.com |

On 05/10/2013 04:21 PM, David Griffith wrote: Linux on an Alpha is probably the worst. I think a lot of that was due to GCC's abyssmal code generation on those architectures at the time. It's much better nowadays. I'll never understand the drive to put Linux on an SGI. "Gee, we've got all this great hardware, let's WASTE it!" -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

On 10 May 2013, at 17:14, "Dave McGuire" <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: I'd argue NT 4 on Alpha is better. But still not what i'd call "fantastic". ;) People want to run linux on everything. Even toilets! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajW2fDy41fY) Linux is definitely a waste of SGI's hardware.

On 05/10/2013 05:48 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote: Depends on the architecture. It has historically been bad on RISC platforms. It was originally written for CISC, and its code generation on 68K and VAX (for example) is quite good. Yes. Good as an educational exercise (the porting), but kinda pointless to actually run. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

On 10 May 2013 23:55,various people wrote: It seemed like a good idea at the time (it wasn't) because: The IRIX on the machine was knackered. I didn't have any media to reinstall it. I hadn't heard of this mailing list. I wanted to try to run my BBS software on it. --- I wouldn't do it again, and I wish I could get it going on IRIX again. I haven't powered it up in ages. I wonder if it's still working... (; -- Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems: "The Future Begins Tomorrow" Visit us at: http://www.yoyodyne-propulsion.net -------- "Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to discover that he had been transformed into a giant cockroach." Nah, it's too good. --Max Bialystock

At 5:14 PM -0400 5/10/13, Dave McGuire wrote: Having run Solaris 2.6 on a Sun SparcStation 2, I don't think I'd want to run Linux on a Sun IPC. As for Linux on an Alpha, I've not tried that, but that was the first CPU it was ported to, after x86. I have run OpenBSD on an Alphstation 200 4/233 and found it to perform quite nicely. My problem with running UNIX on an Alpha is it's a waste of hardware that could be used to run OpenVMS! Much to my surprise a couple weeks ago, I found the DECstation 5000 that I bought to run NetBSD. I thought I'd dumped it on Jim Willing over a decade ago. Zane -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh at aracnet.com | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | | Photographer | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | My flickr Photostream | | http://www.flickr.com/photos/33848088 at N03/ | | My Photography Website | | http://www.zanesphotography.com |

On 10 May 2013, at 18:50, "Seth Morabito" <lists at loomcom.com> wrote: I really hope it performed better than ULTRIX performs in a simulator...

I keep (and use!) my Amiga 2000 and Mac Color Classic to show people how FAST a GUI can be, when it is not bloated by useless functions :oP

On 05/10/2013 11:43 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote: I love GUIs for "utility" things like email, and of course for drawing schematics and laying out PCBs, but really, a GUI for me is just a very effective way to get a whole shitload of terminals on one desktop. I tend to do deeply technical work nearly all the time, which is nearly all text-based, with the occasional graph or plot. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

At 6:50 PM -0400 5/10/13, Seth Morabito wrote: As mine was a special secure version of A/UX 2.0 on a Mac IIfx that was cleared for Top Secret work, I'd just as soon forget it. OTOH, it was quickly followed by Linux 0.12 on my 486/33 (I'd looked into getting UNIX for the system before Linux was released). Then HP-UX, SunOS, Solaris, and the list goes on.... Zane -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh at aracnet.com | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | | Photographer | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | My flickr Photostream | | http://www.flickr.com/photos/33848088 at N03/ | | My Photography Website | | http://www.zanesphotography.com |

Well, I will admit to a certain soft spot for 6th Edition. On the other hand, admitting to it makes me feel really old... BLS

On 11 May 2013 01:37, <blstuart at bellsouth.net> wrote: Mine was Xenix.... man that was a long time ago! -- Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems: "The Future Begins Tomorrow" Visit us at: http://www.yoyodyne-propulsion.net -------- "Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to discover that he had been transformed into a giant cockroach." Nah, it's too good. --Max Bialystock

First one I got any real training on was NCR's flavor of AT&T 5.4. Then later AT&T 5.4 itself, so I guess I'll go with that. Not real old, not real new. Kinda like me. :) Brad

Xenix-86, loosely based on edition 7, 1988. It ran on an Altos 586. ____________________________________________________________ GET FREE SMILEYS FOR YOUR IM & EMAIL - Learn more at http://www.inbox.com/smileys Works with AIM?, MSN? Messenger, Yahoo!? Messenger, ICQ?, Google Talk? and most webmails

It was, but not by much. While the 586 was expressly designed to run Xenix, the machine was already old (and notoriously temperamental) by 1988. Its only saving grace was that it's boot drive was a Quantum Q-540, possibly the most bulletproof 40meg drive ever built. I sysadmin'd that system (for a cellular phone dealership) for about a year. It was attached to a mag-tape drive, and every month or so, they'd run the billing tapes they'd get from the phone company. I dreaded the whole thing as it was a pretty dodgy process. I spent alot of late nights fixing corrupted databases caused by hardware issues (usually memory glitches, or failures with the OTHER drive, which was 70meg Micropolis, I believe). I did learn how to write shell scrips on it though, so I guess I came out even. Unix in the bad ole days could make you sweat bullets... N0body ____________________________________________________________ FREE ONLINE PHOTOSHARING - Share your photos online with your friends and family! Visit http://www.inbox.com/photosharing to find out more!

Since everyone else seems to be, I might as well.... BSD 4.1c on a VAX-11/750, very shortly afterwards replaced by 4.2. But my first taste of Unix was prereleases of Eunice. My larval phase was spent under VMS on an 11/780, and Eunice was terribly, terribly confusing until I found out what it was resembling. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

Slackware Linux. Prior to that, I had used only PCs and Macs, and "big" (relative term) systems, like PDP-11, 3090, 4361, and VAX. Linux opened up a whole new world for me. From there, I made my way to everything else (Sparc Solaris, AIX, HPUX). Lots of fun. Thanks Slackware... - Earl

My first experiences were several, all in 1979-1985 at Purdue University: PDP11/70 running version 7 PDP11/45 running version 6 PDP11/40 running version 6 VAX 11/780 running 4.1 BSD VAX 11/780 dual CPU (originally developed at Purdue) running a hacked dual/slave version of BSD (don't recall if it was 4.1 or 4.2 at that point) VAX 11/750 running 2.9 and later 2.10

Mine was 3BSD running on a VAX 11/780 at Tektronix. Probably early 1980. Wasn't too much long after that, it was upgraded to 4BSD. I should say that the 11/780 ran production VMS during the day, but at 5PM, VMS was shut down, and BSD was loaded up for engineers and others to tinker with. It would stay online until 7AM, when VMS was returned to production use. Made for some long days...got to work at 8, and frequently wouldn't leave until 10PM. Those were the days where I had boundless energy (not so much any more). It wasn't too long before engineering really started yelling at the Computer Science Center about wanting full-time BSD, so another 11/780 was purchased for full-time Unix use. The new VAX came up with 4.1BSD, and wow, what a difference. It seemed to run much faster than the older BSD releases. The use of these machines was through a port-contender device...hooked up to a myriad of serial ports on the VAX, and going to a slew of video and printing terminals scattered around the campus. Sometimes it was hard to get a connection, as all of the ports on the VAX were full. The Unix machines because extremely popular very quickly. I mainly used a Tek 4023 (I think that was the model) dumb video terminal. I loved that terminal. It had a great keyboard, and just worked well. I wish I could find one today. I remember the first Sun machine that came into Tektronix. It was a Sun-2 machine, a 2/120 if I remember correctly. The thought of having one of these on my desk was mind-boggling. It didn't happen until quite some time later, when I ended up with a Sun 3/50 at my desk. My first personal Unix system was a Tektronix 6130, that I built from parts ordered from Tektronix engineering stock. The hard disk about broke the bank...a Micropolis 20MB 5 1/4" full-height drive. RAM was pretty expensive, too. It ran a derivative port of 4.2BSD called UTek. The TCP/IP Network stack was a little broken, didn't have the notion of subnet masks. I learned a lot about Unix internals, as I managed to get my hands on source, and could build my own kernels, drivers, and utilities. It took FOREVER to compile and link a new kernel. The machine used a National 32016 CPU. It had roughly 0.8x the performance of a VAX 750 in pure compute, but I/O was much slower. The disk was ST-506. I still love Unix, and always will. Rick Bensene

2BSD (I think) on a PDP-11/70 (or so we were told -- I never saw the machine room), taking a summer class at Harvard in 1983. Teleray 1061 terminals but not enough TTY lines for them (so the TTY concentrator made you wait in line). Awful, awful, terrible, bad system. It took several minutes to assemble and link one screenful of MACRO code (a job a PDT-11/150 running RT-11 from floppies could do in well under a minute). vi couldn't do line insert/delete on T1061s so it didn't try (as you edited, your screen gradually filled up with dead "@" lines until you refreshed). Every once in a while, one of the operators/etc. would run into the terminal room and tell us all to stop typing for a while, since the system would grind to a halt when the TTY buffers filled up (or at least that's what they thought was causing it). So yeah it made quite an impression. I do use Linux when necessary (which is quite a lot) but all the little annoyances still chafe. Additional flamebait: I used to wonder what could be bad enough to make me ever reconsider my dislike for Unix. So then Windows came along. Which got me thinking, what could make *that* seem like a fun place to get real work done? And then the smartphones and tablets arrived. So now I'm thinking -- ??? John (former UNIX-HATERS subscriber -- OK lemme have it!)

On 05/10/2013 06:50 PM, Seth Morabito wrote: Same here. I did save a few (maybe I can send you one, if you're jonesin' for it) but haven't messed with them in awhile. I don't think I have any 5000s, but certainly a few 2100s and 3100s. Excellent. SysV on a 3B1, here. But I ran a whole bunch of Ultrix on a whole bunch of DECstations. (and VAXen, and PDP-11s..) I do like Ultrix. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

On May 10, 2013, at 8:50 PM, "Cory Smelosky" <b4 at gewt.net> wrote: Possibly slower; my real VAX (KA655, equivalent to the CPU emulated by SIMH) is somewhat slower than SIMH on my iMac (2011 model). A lot of that is due to faster I/O than the CPU speed, but still. - Dave

From: Seth Morabito Sent: Friday, May 10, 2013 3:50 PM And I've tried so hard! Pyramid 90x, UChicago, 1982. I liked Ultrix on our VAXen (8650, 3600, 8800, 3100s and 2200s) at LOTS. And our DECstation 3100s. Rich Alderson Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer Vulcan, Inc. 505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900 Seattle, WA 98104 mailto:RichA at vulcan.com mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org (206) 342-2239 (206) 465-2916 cell http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

On Fri, 10 May 2013 18:50:13 -0400 Seth Morabito <lists at loomcom.com> wrote: In my case this was some SCO ODT running on a 486/33, 64 MB RAM, Adaptec EISA SCSI adapter, a 600 MB "brick" (i.e. 5.25 FH) SCSI disk. There where about 20 or so real VT220 and VT220 emulating Qume terminals connected by a terminal server. This was in the fall of 1993, when I started my EE / CS study. That machine was insanely slow, instable and the OS unpleasent to use. -- \end{Jochen} \ref{http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/}

Seth Morabito wrote: [..] Some Kind of Xenix on a 286 was my first Unix, experimented before with an VENIX for a plain 8086, not much fun. Later WEGA (A Zilog Zeus Clone) on a EAW P8000 4Mhz Z8000, 50MD MFM Disk, 2.9BSD on a russian SM1420 in our University, 4.3BSD on a 11/780 Clone (Robotron K1840), some DEC Stations, HPUX 8.05, 9x, SunOS, PC Unicesi Esix 3.2 and 4.0 (SVR3.2, SVR4), Eurix (SVR3.2), Onsite Unix (SVR4.2) for a long time, even at home, tried Linux 0.96.. and still don't like Linux, run 386BSD and FreeBSD since 1.something ... until now. :r!uname -a FreeBSD beast.freibergnet.de 8.2-RELEASE-p10 FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE-p10 #8: Tue May 7 15:01:59 CEST 2013 r at beast.freibergnet.de:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/BEAST i386 Regards, Holm -- Technik Service u. Handel Tiffe, www.tsht.de, Holm Tiffe, Freiberger Stra?e 42, 09600 Obersch?na, USt-Id: DE253710583 www.tsht.de, info at tsht.de, Fax +49 3731 74200, Mobil: 0172 8790 741

On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 1:21 PM, David Griffith <dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu>wrote: How about Linux on a Mac SE/30. If I recall, it took about 18 hours to compile the kernel. - Josh

My first Linux at home box was installing SLS Linux on a 386 DX/40 with 2M or 4M of RAM. It ran X and other stuff to be usable, but this was 1994-1995. I had no clue what I was doing but enough of a clue to use it and maybe not realize how painfully slow it was compared with a true workstation of the time.

On Fri, 10 May 2013, Pete Turnbull wrote: How far under 5? 1 second? ;) -- Cory Smelosky http://gewt.net/ Personal stuff http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments

On 05/10/2013 08:04 PM, Zane H. Healy wrote: I remember MGR! I ran it for awhile on an AT&T 7300, in place of the stock (but nice) GUI called "UA", for User Agent. It was neat. I wonder whatever happened to it...I should try to find it to see if it had undergone any further development. I'm betting you mean that literally, as opposed to, say, a euphemism for "gone crazy". Though that was my first thought. ;) -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

On 5/10/13 4:24 PM, Josh Dersch wrote: Urrrggggh. I ran and compiled Linux on an IBM 7043-133 with 64MB of memory. I have no idea how long the kernel builds took. Something between 8 and 32 hours. Doc

On 10/05/2013 20:47, JP Hindin wrote: So run IRIX :-) I've nothing against Linux, but if you've got an SGI... I've got a few Indys (and 3 Indigos, 3 O2s, and an Origin 2000). The two Indys I use most are now R5000SC powered, and they do OK. One of them runs 24/7 as a server here. Previously they've been various R4400 and R4600, PC and SC, and it must be admitted that most run Irix 5.3 better than 6.5. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York

On 10 May 2013, at 15:22, "John Many Jars" <john at yoyodyne-propulsion.net> wrote: I have one, too. ;) I'm in need of a PSU for it, though. ?and a monitor.

Wow! :oD How I miss my Octane! :'(

On 5/10/2013 12:20 PM, Jonathan Katz wrote: The X and Motif manuals are more properly stored under the monitor to bring it up to proper viewing height. Last place I worked 2 different sets were deployed in such a manner. They used the online stuff, of course. jim

It was common pratice (when they were cheap) to keep CDs inside them to protect against (mis)handling. In that time Font and Clipart CDs were WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY expensive here in Brazil :o)

I never USED more than one at a time, since there wasn't room for a second one in the drive. But I did store CDs in caddies, to save time by not having to take a disk out of a caddy and put a different one in. On Sat, 11 May 2013, Alexandre Souza wrote: [As in my personal collection], Just a dedicated CADDY for each disk??!? In the university (UCBerkeley) libraries, it was common practice for a very long time to purchase a dedicated DRIVE for each CD, and dedicate a PC to it. A patron wanting to use a given CD would go to the specific PC that had it (or wait in line for that PC). They then argued that CD-ROMs, which cost significantly less than the dead-tree editions of the same works were TOO EXPENSIVE, due to the "need" to have SO MANY dedicated PCs with dedicated drives. I tried, without success, to argue against the dedicated drives, using the analogy that it was exactly the same as buying a VCR with every tape. I made no progress, even with the library computer technical staff at the UC Office of the President (UCOP ran Melvyl melvyl.ucop.edu, which is the multi-campus Online Public Access Catalog) One small subject library had networked PCs, with a 5 drive CD tower on the server. One could request [in writing and significantly in advance] to have a CD changed on the server. I suggested that the libraries with PC networks should purchase Keith Hensen's "Cubik". It was a large square box containing a "Kodak Carousel"-like rotating round tray holding 100? CDs, and a CD drive in each corner of the box. The 4 drives were SCSI, and the tray rotation, load and unload of the drives was RS232. The tray was modifiable to be lift out, for multiple trays, OR, the complete units were designed to be stackable. One of my favorite personal CDs was "Computer Libraray"/"Computer Select", with full text of most of the computer magazines and abstracts for almost all of the rest. I offered to donate a copy to the university, but they turned down the donation due to the cost of providing a dedicated drive and PC. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

I know a place in Brazil that has lots and lots of these proprietary keyboards (sun too!)