On Tue, August 25, 2009 9:54 pm, Curtis H. Wilbar Jr. wrote: Yup...at Digex in 1993, we coined the "3/270", which is a 3/260 with its wheels removed placed on a wooden shelf in a rack. :) But more properly, a x/x80 is a cube-shaped 12-slot rackmount chassis. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On Aug 25, 2009, at 10:58 PM, Sridhar Ayengar wrote: They really are nice chassis. To toot my own horn a bit, I built some of the very first of what are now known as "blade servers" by putting three of those 12-slot VME chassis in a 6' rack and populating each with six independent Sun-3/60 boards, all net-booted via daisy-chained 10base2. They only drew power from the VME connector, and as such were completely independent machines. Digex sold them in starting in mid-1993 as the "Private Domain" product. Most had 4MB of RAM, but some had as much as 12MB. Most early customers used them as private shell servers (The Washington Post, for example, twp.com) and telnetted in to read email via pine/elm/ etc. Only toward the end of their lives did they come to be used as web servers, running NCSA httpd. Sun said it couldn't work; they told me that on the phone while I was leaning against a rack of them. =) At one point there were close to 200 of them running. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On Aug 25, 2009, at 11:38 PM, Curtis H. Wilbar Jr. wrote: They're totally different in nearly every aspect. They're something like a decade apart. They're pretty tough to find now. About twenty of them (Digex) got trashed in Maryland several years ago; I was unable to save them (1000mi away and no money) but I tried. I *think* there might be one left in my storage locker. I will check the next time I'm there. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL