I appreciate you're coveting... but the system's not mine to give. It belongs to CSC, and was left-over from our Y2K group. They had just stuck it in a closet and forgotten it. As the resident UNIX guru at the time it was on my inventory. When I moved out into the field I claimed it as a workstation. Since nobody knew it existed, and since it was way past the 3-year depreciation cycle, there weren't any objections. Unforunately CSC doesn't allow for any internal purchasing because of liability issues. So I couldn't buy it off them.

I too would like to get a hold of a board. The system here at the office is the 591. That's the earlier board design. There are three different versions. I'd love to get a hold of an MCA board like this one because I have equivalent RS6000 hardware in my private collection. I could easily host such a thing. The later boards are, I believe, PCI, and in two differnt versions. I've never seen the board appear on auction sites -- and I'm worried that anyone who did have one, might not know it, since it just sits in otherwise ordinary gear. The best I can tell you is watch out for specific models of hardware and hassle the seller to see if they omitted the board. The models are the PC330 and PC500 intel systems. And in RS6000 they've used F50, 591 and a few 390 systems.

about these systems in the open systems community. If you go trolling through vendor and support organization sites, stick to the mainframe folks. I'm afraid that's as much of a brain dump as I've got on sourcing these boards. If you do find a source, please pass the information on. I'd love to add one to my collection. Until then I'll have to deal with Hercules. Not that this is a bad thing. Hercules on a decent piece of hardware is considerably faster then a P390 board. The one I've got is all of 72mHz clock speed and 128MB RAM. You could build a much more substantial LINUX based system to host a mainframe operating system.