Ridge 32/330 up and running!

[Josh Dersch]

On 3/29/15 11:17 AM, Jules Richardson wrote:
> On 03/29/2015 12:16 AM, Josh Dersch wrote:
>> You can see some pictures of this beast at:
>
> Damn, that's nice :)  I always think that "old Unix" is much of a 
> muchness in machines of this era - the OS is probably nothing that 
> special; it's the hardware that makes them interesting.
It's a pretty crude UNIX port, they didn't do much with it to pretty it 
up or anything, but it's functional.... (the shutdown process is: run 
"shutdown" (no args) then wait for the machine to drop to single-user, 
run "sync" a couple of times and turn the machine off. Still makes me 
nervous every time :).

But the hardware seems to be very well built and an interesting design.  
It's also pretty fast (relative to other machines I have from that era) 
at least in terms of integer performance based on a very crude benchmark 
I wrote :).

It's a shame there doesn't seem to be more out there in terms of 
software for this thing.  I have enough documentation for the hardware 
to make it seem possible to port NetBSD to it, but that would also 
require building an entire toolchain for the CPU and, well, if I had 
that kind of time...

Now I just need to fix the power supply...

>
>> 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
>
> Do you know the history of this particular system? I'd say it's 
> definitely worth doing, just for whatever software and data (which 
> might tell some sort of "story") is on the drive.
It has a Ridge asset tag, and I was told that it was used internally for 
testing database software.  That may be what the Fujitsu Eagle in the 
second cabinet was for; the drive is currently inoperable (does not spin 
up) and it's really a two-person job to even move it around to debug so 
that's going to have to wait for a rainy day or three...

- Josh

>
> cheers
>
> Jules
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